Elegy to the Bone Kimono —Zen Assays—

—Reflections on Poetry & Koans—

Dane Cervine

Elegy to the Bone Kimono

Assays on Zen, Poetry

& Imagination

Dane Cervine

Inquiries of the author may be made to:

Kado Press c/o Dane Cervine 153 Alta Avenue

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

831-706-8866

DaneCervine@cruzio.com

www.DaneCervine.typepad.com

Copyright 2016 by Dane Cervine

-- All rights reserved –

Kado Press

Contents

PREFACE ........................................................................................................................ 6

Elegy to the Bone Kimono ................................................................................................ 8

Bodhisattva of the Bullheaded Whale ............................................................................ 15

Odysseus’ Mess .................................................................................................................. 20

Procrustes’ Iron Bed, and Tempyo’s Two Wrongs ...................................................... 23

Cosmic Turtles, Screaming Underwater, and the Glittering Knob ............................ 27

Snow Lion, Earthworm, Invisible Ink ............................................................................ 31

The Angel and the Zen Master ....................................................................................... 35

The Jeweled Cobweb of Indra ........................................................................................ 40

The Mindful Life: Russian Ostyt &The Eros of Patience ............................................ 45

The Millihelen of Beauty and All Possible Pain .............................................................. 48

A Koan of Light ................................................................................................................ 54

Zen and the Art of the Cosmos ...................................................................................... 56

Venus, Mars, Planet X, Red Dwarfs, Black Holes, & Your Original Face ............... 61

What is a Human Being? .................................................................................................. 64

Where Do The Words Go In a Dead Person? ............................................................. 67

The Genjo of Jonas’ Whale, Ockham’s Razor, Violins & String Theory ................... 70

An Incident of Beauty ...................................................................................................... 73

Blue Jazz, Chess, & the Many Faces of Buddha ........................................................... 79

Blue Robe, Divine Wine, & Everyday Zen ................................................................... 81

Diamond Street Sutra in San Francisco ......................................................................... 84

One Bowl, One Boat, & The Whole Enchilada ........................................................... 86

The Five Gene Game, Under the Big Sumerian Moon ............................................... 89

Waking To a Strong Poker Hand .................................................................................... 92

The Zen of Loki ................................................................................................................ 95

An Ordinary Human Being ............................................................................................. 98

Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 99

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PREFACE

Writer person completely like monk. Poetry is your meditation. —the wise monk Tsung Tsai in George Crane’s Bones of the Master. The odd title, Elegy to the Bone Kimono is a poetic mix of the three poetry books alluded to in the first essay. It is meant as a bit of Zen provocation, illustrative of the blending of boundaries inherent in moments of practice and poetry. It also alludes to the way that Zen as Zen (kimono, tradition) is always disappearing, changing form—even the bones of it. Essays, or assays—to stretch both poetry and Zen worlds, to find the seams, the zipper-teeth where they are zippered and sewn together into one robe—the classic image of the seamless life of non-dual practice. Not two, but one. The term assay, similar but different than essay, is used by both Joan Sutherland, as Zen teacher, and Jane Hirshfield, as poet, to describe a contemplative form of written inquiry reflective of both Zen and poetics. To examine the characteristics of something, in this case through meditation and poetics rather than analysis of a metal or ore. This book of assays on Zen, poetry, and imagination utilizes metaphoric language similar in its way to the use of koans in Zen. Joan Sutherland, a Pacific Zen School co-founder with roshi and poet John Tarrant, describes this approach to both language and practice:

Koans are metaphors...In classical Chinese, the original language of the koans, you don’t ask What is X? You ask What is X like? … Metaphors are polytheistic: my love is a red red rose, love is a dagger through my heart, love is blind, love is the opening door. Explanations are monotheistic: love is a pheromone-triggered state neurochemically indistinguishable from psychosis. Metaphors and explanations have very different views of what truth is. Explanations settle things, put an end to the journey, which is sometimes a great relief and sometimes premature. Metaphors connect one thing to another, often in new ways, and the journey veers off in unexpected directions.

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I am both poet and Zen practitioner. For me, it is a non-dual path, a single robe to wear each day. These assays reflect discovered Zen moments in poetry and the imagination, thus are a poetics of Zen more than a plumbing manual or set of instructions about how to screw the jungle-gym of the mind together. Years of mindfulness meditation have helped me build the house of practice by simply watching how I am made, by the hammer, saw, screwdriver of mind. Zen has helped me open the windows, let the breeze rustle through—step outside even, stand naked in the open field. These assays are inflected, too, by the literary form of zuihitsu, or Flowing Brush—a classical Japanese form derived from the Chinese literary tradition that employs random thoughts, diary entries, reminiscence, and poetry. It emerged sometime in the Heian Period (794-1185 AD), first seen in Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, named so because she literally sewed a pile of secret notebooks into a pillow, kept as a court attendant to Japanese Empress Sadako-Teshi. The assays in Elegy to the Bone Kimono weave with similar intent—blending the threads of literature and practice, contemplation and daily life. It is a cross-genre work, meant to paint in different modes of prose and koan, essay and assay; to include sources beyond traditional Zen’s canon, especially Western poets & writers. Thereby to be as spry as Zen itself. Still, while poetry and Zen may be woven together, one is not precisely the other. This is evident by example in the different trajectories of Zen in Gary Snyder’s life and poetry, where actual practice infuse both living and writing, and Jack Kerouac’s life and poetry, where Zen as poetics and periodic altered state was girded more by wildness than actual practice, and in the end, alcohol more than meditation. Neither Zen nor Poetics can replace the other, even if they infuse each other. Perhaps there is a version of the traditional Zen formulation of the relationships between Form and Emptiness that might help here: Zen is Zen – Poetry is Poetry – Zen is Poetry – Poetry is Zen. How’s them noodles?

Dane Cervine Santa Cruz, California

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Elegy to the Bone Kimono I woke this morning thinking about poetry as a kind of Zen practice, without the overt packaging of Zen. This is how I read poetry. I assume many of the poets I read have no intention of writing Zen poems, and there is no mention of Zen other than as an occasional icon to fluff up a poem’s hipness. Yes, we poets still do this, ever since Kerouac and crew rhapsodized about Buddhism as a kind of jazz. Which it also is. But Zen is sneaky. Its wakefulness in the transient, appreciativeness in the poignant, is so mischievously present in some of the poetry being written today that I can’t help but exclaim Wow! when no one is looking—as I did yesterday sitting under the liquid amber tree reading Bob Hicok, Sarah Lindsay, and David Shumate. Why even use the overused word Zen? Because Zen embodies a quirky, raw, transparent seeing which some poets unknowingly embody, and unselfconsciously convey in their language. Hint at a mode of awareness that, while perhaps not Zen in any precise or intentioned manner, is nonetheless Zen because of it. The awareness of paradox, of the fleeting in life, of the Buddha’s encounter with the three conditions of life aging, illness, death—which the poet gnashes endlessly on like a cow chewing its cud—is so proximate with Zen’s concerns as to be mirror reflections of each other’s moons. Poetry, a certain kind of poetry certainly, embodies an awareness more naked than Zen itself. If you get my jazz. Take Bob Hicok, his book Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon Press, 2013) described as “an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and you can never step into the same not going home again twice.” Zen in some ways is more existential than spiritual, more a game of Twister than Monopoly, more about mourning than salvation. Basho describes Zen as knowing the journey itself is home, which poetry embodies in its restless word-craft, never stepping in the same river twice. Take these lines from Hicok’s opening poem, “Pilgrimage”:

I put birds in most poems and rivers, put rivers in most birds and thinking, put the dead

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in many sentences blinking quietly, put missing into bed with having, put wolves in my mouth hunting whispers, put faith in making, each poem a breath nailed to nothing.

If this isn’t a secret Zen poem, then you’re just not breathing. The interpenetration of bird and poem, river and the dead, missing and having, is a haiku-like awareness of living’s poignancy, of the non-duality of life as one thing—whole, yet nailed to nothing. To write this, and to read this in anything less than a cursory manner, is to catch a “whisper” of Zen. Hicok’s poem, “O”, is about a man and his son holding hands as they cross a parking lot, and how:

last night, thinking I was moved by the root or lifeboat or ladder of the father’s arm into the life of the son, the root or labyrinth of his arm as they moved at the pace of the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being wobbly in water and I wanted to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon, I wish there were a word that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be sun, all of it in my mouth…

Here, too, is a language of interpenetration between the worlds of viewer, the father

and son, the moon and sun, the Zen of being more than the word of it, of being all

of it, in the poet’s mouth as well as the listener’s ear. In another poem entitled

“Knockturn”, Hicok intimates similar sensibilities in these lines:

I would go to that school, I would major in Yes, the dark is my favorite suit to wear

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where bear are also sometimes, and coyote and the dead get to be whatever they want as far as I can tell, the less I can see… I take the little I can make out with, holding what I am held by, the night and I almost the same smudge of whatever this is, it is seductive to wade into and slip away and not drown, my life the only thing that has been with me my whole life.

Hicok’s poetics here, to “major in Yes” is akin to the Zen stance of openness and

intimacy with whatever in life rises up to meet us. In Zen, as in poetry, it is not only

the light that enthralls: the dark is my favorite suit to wear, inclusive of the world as bear

and coyote and the dead. Poetry does not really “explain” the world any more than

Zen does—still, the night and I almost the same smudge of whatever this is. To wade in and

not drown. This whole life that is the only one we know—poetry the language of its

occurrence.

∞ Then there is Sarah Lindsay, and her brilliant book Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), the title of which has to be one of the better Zen titles I’ve encountered, illustrative of the interconnectedness of the world. Her title poem describes this “tender pink plantlike oceangoing worm” which has no concept of us, nor of being recently “discovered”, but without whose invisible activity every seashore would be barricaded by skeletons of whales. This Osedax mucofloris,

…eases her animal root through, into a scapula, a rib, perhaps the vestigial pelvis, and eats or drinks or otherwise absorbs the structure, and when she leaves, it’s gone.

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Without this action of decay and impermanence, one of the key Buddhist “marks of existence” (anicca, in Pali), the activity too of earthworms and their cousins ensure that “logs and carcasses haven’t piled up higher than the pine-tops.”

And so, we can go on gardening, hiking, throwing Frisbees on the beach, ignoring the ugly ones, the specialists, minute, nocturnal or hidden from light, the smudge, the slime, the particles in their modest trillions that shield us from excess…

This poetic recognition of reality’s invisible diligence in keeping the world turning, and us from being smothered literally with the dead, is commensurate with Zen’s deepest insights into this same reality. To see in this way is not an accidental act, and it conveys a rippling wave whether the stone thrown into the pond is called meditation or poetry, prayer or literature. Lindsay’s poem “Origin”, which graces the back cover of her book, I quote in its entirety as it is a skillful poetic renditions of Zen’s notion that the evolution, for lack of a better word, of the One into the Many is as inevitable and ironic as desire itself, reminiscent of the koan, Why can’t clear-eyed Bodhisattvas sever the red thread?

ORIGIN

The first cell felt no call to divide. Fed on abundant salts and sun, still thin, it simply spread, rocking on water, clinging to stone, a film of obliging strength. Its endoplasmic reticulum was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length; its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA magnificent. With no incidence of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit, no predator or prey, it had little to do but thrive,

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draw back from any sharp heart or bitterness, and change its pastel colors in a kind of song. We are descendants of the second cell.

In a similar vein, the Book of Equanimity, one of Zen’s core koan collections, includes Koan 100—“Roya’s Mountains and Rivers”:

A monk asked Kaku Osho of Roya, “If the original state is clean and pure, then why suddenly do rivers, mountains, and the great earth arise?” Kaku replied: “If the original state is clean and pure, then why suddenly do the mountains, rivers, and great earth arise!”

The apparent “answer” from Roya to the monk reflects the original question back as a statement with an exclamation mark, rather than a question mark. Yet both marks—that of exclamation and questioning, as in Rilke’s advice to the young poet to live inside the questions themselves, are akin to Sarah Lindsay’s poem. And any good Zen master’s wink of the eye. If our “origins” have the capacity for being “changing…pastel colors in a kind of song”, with “no incidence of loneliness, inner conflict”, with “little to do but thrive”, then how and why does the second cell divide, then divide again unceasingly till it becomes We…descendants of the second cell? There are other famous Zen koan which play with this notion that “all things return to the One”, by mischievously pointing to any concrete detail at hand to indicate “where the One returns to”. Which is here, in the endless iterations of the Many. Which is perhaps why the second cell divides, as part of the One’s own invisible longing—perhaps how poetry, too, got its start. Now, as a poem, there is no “stink of Zen” in the literature itself. It is only a poem. We are only the second cell. Which is why the poem, and Sarah Lindsay’s book, is its own kind of Zen, jettisoning even those three little letters. And while it is a book of light, in its way, like life it is a light similar to Lindsay’s poem “Radium”, where Marie and Pierre Curie win the Nobel Prize for their discovery,

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Lying with her husband for a few hours’ sleep, cracked hands and weakened legs entwined, united gaze resting on the vial of radium salts they kept beside them every night for the lovely light it shed.

Unaware, or perhaps uncaring, that this very light, this very earth, is what kills us in the end. Zen, and poetry, is not other than this living or dying. This darkness, this radioactive light.

∞ Which brings me to David Shumate’s collection of prose poems, Kimonos in the Closet (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). His imagistic, enigmatic poems are a kind of koan in themselves, as in “Chagall’s Blue Horse”:

When the blue horse arrives in my dreams, I take it as a good omen and treat it like a prophet with four legs. It does not obey the regular rules of equines. So I never know what to expect. I’ve ridden deep into the past upon its back where my young grandfather was brushing my grandmother’s hair. I’ve met people of notoriety…Napoleon. Cleopatra. And Buddha, who fed the horse an odd little apple then squeezed playfully at its muzzle. Once this horse took me to the edge of the universe where I watched the dark womb squeeze another galaxy out. Sometimes the blue horse carries me to a pasture deep inside myself. He grazes there a while. Then lifts his head. And turns. As if trying to teach me something so obvious, no one ever thought to give it a name.

More than the brief appearance of the Buddha in the poem, who simply feeds the horse an “odd little apple” and squeezes its muzzle playfully, there is Zen in the poet’s awareness of the dark womb of the universe squeezing another galaxy out, whether an internal or external cosmos. In the poem, or in meditation, we edge close to “something so obvious, no one ever thought to give it a name.” Which itself is that act of perception in Zen which proceeds the descent into naming.

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Then, there is Shumate’s layered poem, “The Art of the Moors”, which brings a humanistic Buddhist sensibility to encountering the world of the “foreign”, the “other” akin to our modern world’s ongoing collision with the Islamic in all our interdependent complexity:

Last night the Moors loaded their artists on ships and sent them abroad. They believe they have designs that come directly from the divine and want to share them with us. They would like the keys to our churches. Our schoolhouses. Our subways. So they can fill them with floral patterns. With the patterns of peacocks. And such small deer. To demonstrate the purity of their intent, the Moors have covered the hulls of several ship with wondrous blue mosaics. Just now one is sailing into our harbor. It looks like a mosque turned inside out. Or an Alhambra lifted from the land. Their kind-faced artists are waving from the deck. They seem anxious to join us on the piers. The choice is ours. Shower them with flowers. Or place sentinels on the shore.

Beneath the fanciful story of welcoming culture and arts from other countries, there is a core question for both poet and Zen: how do we encounter the world in all its tumultuous, beautiful, beastly uncertainty? Through placing “sentinels on the shore”—be they military, literary, egoic? Or to welcome such a world, the act of welcoming diminishing the likelihood of creating the very enemy one fears. Implicit, too, is an awareness that the politics of identity and its inherent paranoia—the not-self against which one must guard—must itself be guarded against. In a friendly manner. The poem suggests it is the divinity of art itself, the patterns of peacocks, the blue mosaics, the ships that look like a mosque turned inside out, which may save us from ourselves. History, as has been often noted, is a story of war—but it is also a story of art’s relentless digestion, like the bone-eating snotflower, of such detritus. The room it makes for the human in us to flower. Whether this room and its flowers be named poetry, Zen, or simply goes nameless.

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Bodhisattva of the Bullheaded Whale In “Crazy Motherfucker Weather”, Tony Hoagland describes the weather of his aging self, its inexplicable and unpredictable gyrations. He ends the poem with this:

Yet still the wild imperative of self: the sobbing sense that one has not been loved; the absolute demand for nothing less than transformation; the flaring force of this thing we call identity as if it were a message, a burning coal one carries in one’s mouth for sixty years, for delivery to whom, exactly; to where?

This morning there is a theme of this wild imperative of self running through the poems I read, and the occurrences of these past two days. I feel it in the wind blustering through the trees beyond my windows, cloud-waves swimming down from Twin Peaks behind the San Francisco flat we temporarily live in. After two days of brilliant winter sun, with its summer-like heat, it is a strange weather. Linda and I spent Monday afternoon hiking up Twin Peaks. From our Victorian apartment, one can walk straight up Elizabeth Street, over the spiral walkway-bridge that spans Portola Drive, traverse the winding streets till one picks up the dirt paths at the base of the peaks. At almost any point along these steep paths, one can pause (for rest, or wonder), gaze at the panoramic view of the San Francisco bay—the city, the water, bridges golden and gray. Little did we know there had been a double homicide at the top of Twin Peaks in the early Sunday morning hours. A twenty-six year old man had murdered two other young men from Santa Rosa, injured a third, carjacked another vehicle to make his getaway. Was found the next day at his home in Richmond across the bay after someone had seen him fueling the stolen SUV at a gas station.

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I discovered this story belatedly, since the S.F. Chronicle had been sold out, and we’d been enjoying our little Noe Valley bubble over the long weekend. The discovery, as sometimes happens in life, came while concentrating on other matters—namely, Linda’s unforeseen struggles climbing Twin Peaks in the hot sun while on a “cleanse” diet. Usually, she’s in front of my plodding pace up the hill, but she started looking fuzzy, feeling feint—even her eyesight getting cloudy. And we’d brought no water. Finally, after several pauses to take in the beauty of the panoramic view, making sure Linda didn’t feint or roll back down the steep hillside, we made it to the top where I settled her in the shade against the rock wall that rims the Twin Peaks parking lot, and overlooks the bay. I went in search of water. There was none to be found. There were scores of people milling about, peering out over the City—the Pacific glimpsed on one side, the gleaming bay on the other. I looked everywhere for water. There were long, long lines to tiny bathrooms with grumpy tourists waiting impatiently to squeeze in. There was an imposing white van with antennae elevated skyward, black letters spelling out Investigative Unit on the side. Finally, a police-woman and her male partner ambled by. As I approached to ask about water, another man intercepted and thanked them for their presence after the double homicide, that he felt safer with them here. This was the first time I’d heard the story. A bit taken aback, I nonetheless mentioned my wife was feeling feint after the hike up the hill, and was there any water nearby? The woman looked to her partner, pondered, both saying they actually hadn’t seen any since their posting to Twin Peaks today. I must have looked a little crest-fallen, because she pulled out a long unopened water bottle and offered it to me, saying something about heat stroke being a serious issue and to let them know if we needed any help. Perhaps they couldn’t prevent the murder already committed, but you felt them glad to prevent other unnecessary suffering. Finding Linda still leaning into the shade of the rock wall, we sipped water and rested. I told her the story—of the kind offer of water, of the double homicide the day before. Marveled at the macabre contrast between the beauty of this stunning geography, and the geography of selves in such collision that murder would occur

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on the very peak we crouched upon. Then, we slowly descended again to our Noe Valley flat. Water, shade, a comfortable couch—scouring the internet to catch up on this news. Two years ago, this same twenty-six year old man was responsible for a felony hit-and-run collision in a stolen car that caused an AC Transit bus to crash into a house—injuring eleven people including the bus driver. Who knows what drove him these two years since to the dark early morning hours on Twin Peaks? The lights of the city, I imagine, spread below, mirroring the lights in the dark sky above—their impossible raging nuclear reactions traveling immense distances measured in years of light. Named starlight, an apt though romantic name for such radioactive fission. The self, too, an incalculable fission, a rage, a wonder every bit as gleaming as these views from Twin Peaks—whether in brilliant sun, or under cover of dark. It is a wonder that the evolutionary marvel of these complex human eyes, this enigmatic human heart, can take in such scenes and not feint from both the beauty and violence of it all. Twin Peaks, if you will, of this existence—the capacity for living in both worlds. To bear the beauty and brutality both. The wild imperative of self, as Tony Hoagland muses, the flaring force of this thing we call identity runs into the roughest seas when such force is the only strategy for survival—perhaps the kind of wildness and force that flared in the young man who first crashed into a bus, then a house, then murder. Yet, despite its wild, sometimes violent imperatives, it is a self than cannot itself be murdered, even in the name of a higher spirituality, and despite every misguided attempt of meditation to extract and eliminate this tyrant. As though spiritual practice were akin to a Navy SEAL team infiltrating the ego’s fortified domain to “eliminate the target”. Violence begets violence, whether it be societal, political, or the meditative path. Which is why I feel drawn to the Zen of John Tarrant, and the Pacific Zen Institute’s embracing of the self as an evolutionary and poetic marvel to keep company with, rather than eliminate. It is this very urge to violence against one’s self, I suspect, that causes so much damage in the world. The violence of meditator-against-self is akin to life’s history of violence against this young murderer, his own against other young men, society against him. There is another way to encounter this strange weather.

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Poetry helps here, with descriptions more illuminating than mere theory of this wild self. Being is perhaps more sea creature than engineered-thing. Sarah Lindsay, in the poem “Cephalopod and Star and Sea”, compares her being-ness in these ways…

My right hand is a starfish, with rough skin, an ability to anchor itself that looks like stubbornness, radial symmetry—equal, opposing digits, like contradictory beliefs… My left is an octopus, changeable, malleable, graceful and clever. Its fingers twine and twirl apart like thoughts that tangle but never make trustworthy knots… They do agree that they sail a cantankerous ocean, its weather skittish, currents shifty, coral reefs cracked and mended. Excitable cuttlefish relay itches and cravings, awash at times in oil spills, sugar spills. Not to mention the sac of heavenly blue afloat in my head, trailing long wrinkled stinging nerves down my spine. Not to mention the bullheaded whale in my chest.

What an eloquent, and in its way “accurate” reverie of the self—it’s weather, in both

Hoagland and Lindsay’s poems. For Hoagland, there is the echo of the famous Zen

allusion to sitting with one’s self as though a hot brick were stuck in the throat,

something one can neither entirely swallow nor spit out:

a burning coal one carries in one’s mouth for sixty years, for delivery to whom, exactly; to where?

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For Lindsay, the self swims in the cantankerous sea of world and being, with itches and cravings,

Not to mention the sac of heavenly blue afloat in my head, trailing long wrinkled stinging nerves down my spine. Not to mention the bullheaded whale in my chest.

This cantankerous self—sometimes a heavenly blue afloat, yet perched precariously atop the long stinging nerves of the spine this self is threaded through. Not to mention the bullheaded whale in my chest. It is this bullheaded whale, I suspect, that like Moby Dick will not be hunted without consequence. As a therapist I can only guess at how the murderer on Twin Peaks not only hunted, but must have felt hunted—perhaps his entire life. Every child is born with heartfulness and hope. Its loss, whether in the dark murky seas of self or world, has its consequence:

for delivery to whom, exactly; to where?

Those murdered past midnight overlooking the gleaming city—all those we, too, blunder into with blind intent. To make peace with oneself is to fully embrace this self—even the murderer on Twin Peaks. He is the careening dark violence lurking in each of us—ramming into the bus and house and rib cage of our own psyches, or crashing into those around us. Peace is not just absence, but presence. Capable of embracing it all—even a crazy motherfucker. A wild weather. To become, if you will, the bodhisattva of the bullheaded whale.

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Odysseus’ Mess After meditation this morning, in the mood for poetry, I stack my books in a pile, read several poems from each. There is a theme today of the inky dark, missing puzzle pieces, barking dogs, a thousand unheroic moments. Order and disorder. The beauty of a bucket of rusted nails. The mess of it as Zen as any clear water. In her poem “Speaking of the Octopus”, Sarah Lindsay ends with this description of octopus and writer both:

…if she is too deeply moved, makes a decoy self of ink and dissolves behind it.

This “decoy self of ink” is what every writer dissolves into when deeply moved. In these depths, synonymous with the sea itself, is one’s original face—inclusive of the inky self, its dissolutions. The shy octopus so difficult to capture in meditation or poetics. Not separate from the murky medium it swims in. Bob Hicok, in the poem “You name this one”, alludes to a similar difficulty in living and Zen practice alike. The poem begins with the line, Trying to decide what’s as beautiful/as a bucket of nails on a deck, rain by rust/almost blood-colored…then moves later to another beauty, his mother preparing toast for him as a child, every morning, buttered and jammed/and cut in half, an application/of disorder that created/a different sense of order. Disorder and order paradoxically inherent in these moments of living, in beauty itself. So “You name this one” becomes a kind of Zen koan. The poem ends with these marvelous lines,

As when Chartres is broken into a thousand puzzle pieces and becomes a system of a table more interesting when a piece or two or three go missing.

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Isn’t this Zen, and poetics, and living at its most necessary beauty? Despite the longing to therapize everything into a rhapsodic parody of perfection. At the end of another poem entitled “One of those things we say”, Hicok’s musing is flavored with an appreciation of failure, of fall and decay, the barking dog of the mind:

I love how intimate I’ve become with failure. That leaves, having given up green for brown, sky for earth, say things when I walk through them. Gibberish, I think it’s called. Like my thoughts after six hundred miles of travel, that shutter banging in wind, that dog barking at nothing because every time he’s barked at nothing, nothing’s gone wrong and why not keep it that way?

Reminds me of Joshu’s dog koan—does this dog of mind have Buddha-nature? In the Book of Equanimity version of this—Koan 18—the master one moment answers Mu! (No!), another time answers Wu! (Yes!). Which recalls those great song lyrics, you say potato, I say potahto, you say tomato, I say tomahto…Let’s call the whole thing off! Listening to the gibberish, the barking, of the sincerely dualistic mind—how beautiful the human heart is in its gibberish, the mind in its barking. Its own kind of Broadway musical. Still, one must go on a journey to arrive in the non-dual, though the journey itself is home, as Basho says. Which brings me to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Hero’s Journey”, which begins with the lines I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor of a giant hotel lobby/and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night…the author’s emerging sense of not only the interconnectedness of things, but that not everything can be the spotless marble floor, nor the “tall and fair-complexioned knight, Gawain” in the heroic journey. Hoagland says, It tempered my enthusiasm for…Joseph Campbell’s “Journey of the Hero”…and perhaps for that part of oneself that aspires to be only heroic.

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The poem encamps Gawain and the reader beside a cemetery, where we cannot sleep for all the voices rising up from down below, and the poet says,

Let him stay out there a hundred nights, with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his useless sword, until he understands exactly how the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of minor characters.

As well as minor moments, minor parts of ourselves that are not Gawain, not the heroic, that this country of the heroic…

has its citizens… the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 a.m.; the prisoner sweating in his narrow cell; and that woman in the nursing home,

who has worked there for a thousand years, taking away the bedpans, lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.

Chop wood, carry water, clean up Odysseus’ mess. Zen practice is no different than any journey. Sometimes a prisoner in his narrow cell, or a one-armed baker sweeping the mind at 4am. Perhaps heroism is this too. Perhaps enlightenment is the mess of it all, rather than its absence. Odysseus and the old nurse both grateful for the myth of their own living.

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Procrustes’ Iron Bed, and Tempyo’s Two Wrongs Troy Jollimore, who earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, is a professor in the philosophy department at California State University, Chico. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his poetry. I love the following poem, available on the Poetry Foundation web-site, with its hint of Zen, and the surprising last lines:

The Solipsist

Don’t be misled: that sea-song you hear when the shell’s at your ear? It’s all in your head. That primordial tide— the slurp and salt-slosh of the brain’s briny wash— is on the inside. Truth be told, the whole place, everything that the eye can take in, to the sky and beyond into space, lives inside of your skull. When you set your sad head down on Procrustes’ bed, you lay down the whole universe. You recline on the pillow: the cosmos grows dim. The soft ghost in the squishy machine, which the world is, retires. Someday it will expire. Then all will go silent and dark. For the moment,

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however, the black- ness is just temporary. The planet you carry will shortly swing back from the far nether regions. And life will continue— but only within you. Which raises a question that comes up again and again, as to why God would make ear and eye to face outward, not in?

So marvelous. This poetry of the Buddha’s insight that, It is just in this fathom-high mortal frame endowed with perception and mind, that I make known the world. There may be more to us than meets the eye, because entire worlds rise and fall, inside, with every thought—though the traditional Western belief is that perception merely reflects a true world “out there”. I chatted with Troy briefly last night at the Felix Kulpa Art Gallery, though it was his wife Heather Altfeld who was the scheduled reader in the Poetry Santa Cruz series I assist with, and whom I introduced. She, too, lectures at CSU Chico in literature and is about to publish her first book. I used the first few lines of her long poem, “Letter to Galway From Tahoe”, just published in the Winter Issue of ZYZZYVA, to introduce her work, and the way we poets speak to each other whether “alive or dead”:

…when I am sad, I write to my poets, as Hugo did, although his poets, generally speaking, still required postage, and here you are months dead. Still, for all we know down here, the dead like mail as much as the living.

The evening was a delight, and many in the audience said so—this small monthly gathering of poets and listeners, this taking of time, as Troy alludes to, to wearing our ears on the inside. To listen to each other, whether dead or alive. Which is its own ancient koan, are we alive or dead!

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As Heather joked, the reading was competing with Obama’s last State of the Union speech, which I still managed to watch on replay. What a clear, even lyrical call to the country, and the dysfunctional fellow politicians in the congressional chambers, to rise to the demands of governing rather than polarizing into entrenched camps. I do like this President, sorrow with him at the withering of civic life and discourse, and his attempts, like Lincoln, to bring more voices to the table of governance when his adversaries can only undermine any attempt to govern together. Of course, it is easy to bemoan the civic state of affairs, though it seems to be our way of at least trying to pay attention. Still, I am always chastened by history’s stories when I start to think it’s worse than it’s ever been—such as the rank lying and confabulations that even Lincoln engaged in during America’s politics in the 1800’s. On a mass civic scale we seem simultaneously always worse than we believe we are, yet better than we have been through history’s lens. Dead or alive? Alive or dead? It’s a query we live together. Another reminder of this uncertainty in living, whether inside or outside our skulls, was my recent read of the New York Review of Books essay about Empress Theodora and Emperor Justinian’s reign in Constantinople in the sixth century CE toward the latter days of the Roman Empire’s western dominance, where “there had ceased to be a recognizably traditional governing class…The question of what gave any person the right to govern…was far more open than it was at any time in the earlier Roman empire.” Amid this backdrop of constant political ferment, in 532 CE Constantinople’s resident aristocracy attempted a coup against these two in order to set up their own new emperor, only to be lured into the Hippodrome for what they thought was to be Justinian’s execution—instead, 30,000 of the revolting citizens were killed by his still loyal soldiers. Just your average politics of the day. Though it is a “low bar” for comparison, history does tend to agree with the book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, which argues that the human world is moving in the direction of less violence by any statistical analysis. Still, it’s difficult to watch our politics saturated by greed and polarization and actually feel like we’re moving forward. The inchworm approach, I guess. Perhaps, as Troy muses, we need to turn our eyes and ears inward, to better see, to better hear.

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Which brings me to this morning’s koan from the Blue Cliff Records, Koan 98: “Tempyo’s Two Wrongs”. It’s a kind of wacky story about being “wrong”, not once, but twice, in that typical Zen way of challenging would-be masters in their assumptions about knowing the truth, of being “right”. I love this exchange between Master Sai-in and the younger wandering teacher, Tempyo:

One day Sai-in heard Tempyo, called him by his personal name. Tempyo looked up at Sai-in, who said “Wrong!” Tempyo walked a few steps away and Sai-in once again said, “Wrong!” Tempyo turned and approached Sai-in, who said, “I have just said, ‘Wrong’. Who is wrong? Am I or are you?” Tempyo said, “I am.” Sai-in said, ‘Wrong!…Stay here this summer and let us discuss the two wrongs.’ But Tempyo instead left Sai-in.

Tempyo goes on to become an abbot of his own monastery, and later uses this as his own teaching story. On one level, it is a simple story, perhaps applicable to the State of the Union discussion earlier—how shallow perception can become, and estimation of one’s own “rightness” when one takes personal perspective too seriously. But Sai-in’s beauty lay in trying to bring Tempyo more into the very moment they stood in, beyond the question of whether either of them was “right or wrong”—could they stand together in the question itself? I love the invitation, too, to slow things down and “spend the summer together” discussing their supposed wrongs and finding, I suspect, a place beyond such polarized estimations. This reminds me, too, of Kathryn Shulz’s book, Being Wrong—her initial quote, in Benjamin Franklin’s words to the King of France:

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow…But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

Perhaps, too, this should be our modern tenor toward living together in this country, on this planet—rather than luring each other, as in Greek legend, to Procrustes’ iron bed to stretch and hammer others to fit the size of our own limits. Whether in the realm of politics, or spirituality, or Troy Jollimore’s sad skull in which the entire universe lies, it seems essential to have our eyes, ears, and mouths simultaneously pointed toward both worlds. The inward and the outer—the world we see together inching toward beauty.

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Cosmic Turtles, Screaming Underwater, and the Glittering Knob

This morning’s poems from Sarah Lindsay are from a section in her book entitled “Cosmic Turtles”, where she is as oddly obsessed with cosmic ruminations as I am. After the intimate earthbound poems early in the book—octopus and squid and the single celled life forms we came from—she couches her more cosmic wonderings in poems with titles like “Aunt Lydia Attempts a Few Observations”, in which she ponders the realm of quantum physics, how a particle doesn’t quite exist in space till it is observed, then ponders if the One has run into a similar experience with us…

…yet possibly It designed, through us, a sense in which It may experience suspense.

Divine perfection in the long halls of eternity make for a boring party—I love that Sarah brings such rumination into her poems. I love, too, that she couches such musings in a quaint family member thinking out loud. As in the next poem, “Magnitude: Aunt Lydia Does Stretching Exercises”, stretching her mind as she envisions our earth as a “fleck of blue mold” on the cosmic cheese some divine species of immense beings is cultivating:

Think of the milch cow they keep, its size, the heat of its flanks, the weight of its hooves, think of the one who comes to milk her, whistling square roots, perhaps, or wave functions, think of the breadth of space in the swinging pail. And think how you’ve nonetheless fit the whole barn, for a minute at least, in your head.

The last line is quietly magnificent—that for a minute or so, as humans we can fit the whole immense barn of such things, the entire cosmos and our seeming relationship in/with it, inside our tiny heads. Happens all the time in meditation. Worlds rise and fall with every breath or thought. The little poem does stretch me—Aunt Lydia is on to something.

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Then, in “Aunt Lydia and the Cosmic Turtles”, the poet muses on ancient Chinese myth, that three or four elephants hold up the world on the back of a very large turtle:

The modern tale, as Aunt Lydia understands it, says everything, from the merest idea of a nanospeck to the milling gaggle of galaxies, is endowed with natural exigence.

I looked up the word exigence, which can be defined as a state of urgency, the “need, demand, or requirement intrinsic to a circumstance or condition”. The poem goes on,

In the so-called higher forms it may be called desire and more easily thwarted, but each kind persists in the way of its kind:

These lines allude to this Buddhist sense of exigent urgency, desire, that is at the heart of everything. Lindsay going on to include electrons, magnetic fields, baby sea turtles, penguins, immense whales as not only bearing their own natural exigence, but being expressions themselves of cosmic exigence. Such exigency is a kind of suffering, but nonetheless is intrinsic to life. A big deal that is no big deal—just life. In the poem, Aunt Lydia…

…sees a vindication of the old story: Her faith, sometimes an egg, or a heap of ash, sometimes for full milliseconds on end a fragrant blossom…

Life a petal, whether new bud or fallen, which we too can see as beauty. The mysterious universe—an odd confluence of ancient myth and modern physics—where surprise and metaphor become the only language able to keep up with its unfolding. The poet deciding it is as good a story about us as any, that we are indeed…

set firm on the back of a turtle, older still, with that resolute seagoing look in its eye— and as far as Aunt Lydia’s nearsighted eyes can see it is indeed turtles all the way down.

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I like Aunt Lydia, and her divine maker, the poet Sarah Lindsay.

∞ Exigent desire is not always cosmic glory, sometimes it is not even seen—as in Tony Hoagland’s poem “Don’t Tell Anyone”. In the poem his wife casually mentions over breakfast that she screams underwater when swimming laps at the local pool, “that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue”. He says,

For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming silently as they go through life, politely keeping the big secret that it is not all fun to be ripped by the crooked beak of something called psychology, to be dipped down again and again into time; that the truest most intimate pleasure you can sometimes find is the wet kiss of your own pain. He goes on to marvel at his wife, and perhaps all of us: There goes Kath, at one p.m., to swim her twenty-two laps back and forth in the community pool. —What discipline she has! Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages, that will never be read by anyone.

The privacy of one swimmer’s personal pain is oddly universal—in Buddhist estimation, it is the central experience exigent in being human. A colossal cosmic heartbeat that one can still, somehow, discuss nonchalantly over the breakfast table—as long as it can also be screamed inchoately underwater as a kind of ballast, a way of not drowning.

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Being human isn’t for sissies. Neither is Zen. Or poetry.

∞ Finally, in this morning’s reading I come to Louise Gluck’s poem, “A Sharply Worded Silence”, in the Best American Poetry 2015. It is a long poem, a tale from an old woman—some of the lines are haunting, and metaphoric of this living we do:

When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise. That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement. I preferred the moon’s rising… Because it is the nature of garden paths to be circular, each night, after my wanderings, I would find myself at my front door, staring at it, barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob. It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.

This may be the circular nature of life, whether in the infinite kalpas of the Hindu cosmologies, or the recurrent circling back in the darkness to the glittering knob awaiting each person: a great discovery, albeit my real life. This real life, according to Zen, is ever-present—yet encountered only in the paradoxical last lines of Gluck’s poem as she looks for:

…a door with a glittering knob, But when this would happen and where I had no idea.

This not-knowing is perhaps the glittering knob, Zen’s secret to intimacy with one’s real life. One opens this door, and has no idea what will happen next.

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Snow Lion, Earthworm, Invisible Ink I turn again to my spate of books as a kind of map for the path, or a mirror for the small holes in me where the un-nameable lives. First, Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed:

A country mapped with invisible ink …how to escape my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said, while adoring there the rocks, the teacups, if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half the inflection of loss and half a genuflection to breath:

Zen in the poetics of the country we are, the self with its slums, the ghetto of the said—still, adoring what is impenetrable and fragile inside us: the rocks, the teacups. Personal history half Molotov cocktail, half inevitable loss—and the more that breath opens one to: the invisible, the unmapped. Though the saying of it is a slum of words, which is the quintessential Zen critique, still there are wildflowers in these slums, water spraying from the broken fire hydrant on the corner to play in. There is no better country to find than the slum of one’s own life. Hicok’s sentiments of how to escape and find the self simultaneously are also reflected in this poem by Jane Hirshfield, from her book The Beauty:

Like The Small Hole By The Path-Side Something Lives In

…in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of or what they eat.

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They eat of me. Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and drought I do not drink. And in my streets—the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self map— they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow…

I slept so deeply last night, as though wandering “in low fields of me”, or the narrow unlabeled streets of my own self-map—so much so that it felt disorienting to wake, here. Where has this self of mine been at night? Wandering wider fields? Why is my waking self suddenly so unfamiliar? Yet, here I am again, after a few breaths, a few poems, a few sips of dark coffee’s nectar. Like Sarah Lindsay, in poems from Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower, where the selves of snailfish, earthworm, and human learn…

Adaptive Behavior

Five miles deep, on the Japan Trench floor… Snailfish bear large eggs, deal carefully with their young, move swiftly in the dark, in an ocean of pressure—and here the observers, so easily drowned or crushed, thought to find only feeble, half-paralyzed creatures. Snailfish move as if joyous, Never pine, fear no grief; They are strong…like earthworms in old gold mines who swallow copper, lead, and arsenic, yet thrive, excreting milder poisons. A snailfish ripples through Pacific depths, an earthworm tunnels under England,

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and neither bears an enormous brain that must be fed… Such brains belong to the ones who invented a camera that can plumb the sea… sometimes sit on one side of a bed, too sad to pull on socks, and sometimes fall in love like mangoes hitting the ground; the ones who scrounged for grants and skipped having kids so they could be seasick over the trench where hypothetical solitary, anemic beings listlessly lived—and who leaned toward their video evidence of vigorous fish and made noises of pure delight.

I wonder if we humans might look as surprisingly vigorous to theoretical outside observers enamored with the intense pressures, the toxic poisons, of this realm of existence—marvel at our joys, the way we swallow poisons, excrete them as art, if we’re lucky, or a less artistic suffering if we’re not. I do not romanticize these “simpler brains”, only that by example they are so one with, attuned with, the mediums through which they live: deep sea, deep earth. The complexity of human brain and soul demands a more complex union with the medium we move through as humans: this deep sea, this deep earth, of consciousness. It is indeed enough to render one solitary and anemic. Yet this is the essential surprise of Zen: to find that in essence we are beings capable of pure delight when attuned to the thick pressures of this very living we inch and fin our way through. Joy does not require a simpler brain, only a more complex joy. One comfortable with paradox—living with vigor in a non-dual world. Which brings me to Koan 26 of the Book of Equanimity – “Kyozan Points to Snow”:

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Kyozan pointed to a snow lion and said, “Can anyone go beyond this color?”

In the koan’s Preface, there is this line:

Freeze the dharma-kaya to death, and ruin Gyoho with purity…

And in the Appreciatory Verse that follows the koan, there is this line:

Though pure light illumines the eye, it’s like being lost from home…

Rather than aspire only to a pure spiritual light, freezing life into death-like perfection, or blinding the eye with such monochrome brilliance, there is this marvelous question in the koan: Can anyone go beyond this color? Perhaps the snailfish, or the earthworm—perhaps, even, me.

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The Angel and the Zen Master In Meetings With The Archangel, by Stephen Mitchell, the narrator is being shown the endless realms of eternity, including the simple, brilliant Light of being:

The light was beautiful beyond words. It was loving beyond words. I was about to plunge straight into it, when I was yanked back. “I promised to return you,” Gabriel said. “Now you know. That single movement backward makes all of us possible”.

I love this exchange, the single movement backward that makes all of us possible. It is not a mistake to step back from this light. It is the only door into life. This passage is very Zen, too—despite the angel stuff. It reflects the koan refrain, All things return to the One, but where does the One return to? There is no better where than here, in this intimate, finite human life. Eternity will take care of the rest. Mortality offers what eternity can’t. Might as well enjoy it, and embrace rather than flee this “single movement backward” from the One into the Many. Once Gabriel brings the narrator back into his body after all the “sights”, he says:

“There is something that we should talk about when we return to earth. It’s why I came to you.” “And why exactly is that?” I said. “Because you are still holding on to the idea of a consciousness that is superior to your own.” “Aren’t you supposed to be an archangel? You sound like a Zen Master.”

The book, of course, alternates chapters between the archangel Gabriel, and the narrator Stephen’s fictional Zen master, David—an apparent amalgam of the Zen teachers the real author Stephen engaged in study with (according to a dinner conversation I had with John Tarrant at a retreat). The whole dialectic, really, is a beautiful illustration of John’s description of the differing movements of ascent and descent required of humans on the path, even in Zen—this alternation between spirit

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in the person of archangel Gabriel, and of soul in the earthy no-nonsense Zen of David. And I love, too, that in the book the angel recognizes the human David, in his Zen wakefulness, as somehow embodying more wisdom than Gabriel himself. It is the riposte of the Buddha’s parry to each seeker’s question, the belief that there is some other expert beyond one’s own discriminating awareness, doubt, and fierce curiosity:

…you are still holding on to the idea of a consciousness that is superior to your own. Whether spoken by a fictitious archangel, a semi-fictional Zen master, a real life author, or an ostensibly historical realized being named Gautama Buddha, it is the thought that counts. I mean the no-thought, I mean, oh you know what I mean, don’t you?

∞ Then there is this delightful exchange in the book, when the narrator Stephen is attempting to elicit the exact moment of Zen teacher David’s enlightenment by studying two poems he wrote after. Stephen, exasperated at his teacher’s evasive playfulness finally says:

“Please, David. I’m trying to get a handle on the experience.”

“I’m being quite serious”, he said, with a smile in his eyes. “Anyway, experience comes without a handle. You know that.”

I knew how slippery a Zen Master can be: a cross between Jacob’s angel and a greased pig…

Exactly. Then later, the narrator describes the essential insight of Zen master Dogen:

“To be enlightened by all things is to drop off your own body and mind…No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.” You wash away the dirt, then you wash away the soap that washed away the dirt. You heal yourself of the disease, then you heal yourself of the medicine. What is left has nothing special about it. No Buddha (awakened being), no Dharma (teaching), no Sangha (community). It’s just you, beneath the big sky of no enlightenment, treading the lush, bountiful earth of everyday mind.

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As in the tenth Ox-herding picture, one rides this quirky mind back into village life. Where one may, if not otherwise occupied with work and family—or even through these beloved entanglements—loafe and lean, as Walt Whitman says, in the celebration of No-Self. After the fictional Zen master-amalgam David has his “great enlightenment”, he quietly writes a poem called “The Three Treasures”:

Buddha Wakes up, brushes teeth, still the same old face in the mirror. Dharma It costs a death: what any grass could tell you. Sangha No one in the audience knows the bride or groom, yet we’re all happy.

Strange how true a fiction can be. Of course, in the book, as in life, David finds that even a “great enlightenment” has its curve balls, which he gets knocked upside the head with in confrontation with a growing, nameless rage that inexplicably still lingers. Which causes him to abandon his teacher’s robe and get himself back into therapy in America:

…here he was, the great Tao-shan’s son and heir, the Buddha’s seventy-ninth direct successor, the American Bodhidharma, starting back at square one, in the psychological cleanup brigade, incapable of saving anyone but perhaps, himself. Instead of high spiritual drama, this was slapstick. He had stepped off the top of the hundred-foot flagpole, smack into a brick wall. He sometimes thought, wryly, that the chapter title for this year of his life would have to be, “Buddha on the Couch” or, even more accurately,

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“Buddha on the Skids.” It was absurd. It was necessary. It was hard work. And what had he attained as son and heir? What had there ever been to attain…wasn’t this work life itself in all its superb rawness, no less spiritual than any other stage of his practice?

Without this stage in the book’s narrative, I wouldn’t have trusted the previous one. Still, the narrator says:

According to conventional Zen storytelling, all this couldn’t be happening. You had one great enlightenment and that was it. You lived happily ever after, you filled out the fifty-year postscript, you walked all over India, or Iowa, with gift-bestowing hands and spoke-marks on the soles of your feet, teaching the truth…But enlightenment meant “finite”: that’s all, folks. There was no such thing as post-enlightenment practice.

You can see this tendency in books such as The Roaring Stream, about the long lineage of Zen teachers and poets stretching back to Bodhidharma. The farther back you get historically, the more idealized and un-human their stories become. The closer to modern times, the more glimpses one gets into the politics, economics, rivalries, and ordinary cares of these guys. I know my predilection is less idealization (even though I’m a bit of an idealist), and more humanness in this territory. The idealization inherent in most religious history, as the Zen master-amalgam David realized,

…was just a way of shaping a biography, of making a more profound and textured adult story into a fairy tale that was both inspiration and obstacle for beginners on the path…

That was one reason he came to value the Tao Te Ching so highly, with its matter-of-fact insistence on the ordinariness of the Master, who makes mistakes just like the rest of us but is impeccable in admitting them as soon as he can see them, and in correcting them with a minimum of karmic residue. One of the saving graces of the modern integration of ancient Buddhist practice with the Western psyche is the bravery of teachers such as Jack Kornfield, in the Theravadin tradition, and John Tarrant, in the Zen tradition (among others) who have been quite transparent about the continued human development, the ever-present human context, for ongoing practice. Of course, they weren’t the first, just among the first Westerners after the glamor of the new exotic Buddhism wore off a bit.

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The old Zen Masters were, of course, quite aware of such danger. The author’s favorite among them, the golden-tongued Chao-chou, once said to a large audience, “Even the word buddha makes me want to throw up.’ A monk stood up and asked, “Then how do you teach people?” Chao-chou said, Buddha! Buddha! Such meticulous teachers these old rogues were. Here’s to the human in the non-event of no-enlightenment—may we all be so lucky!

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The Jeweled Cobweb of Indra Randomly, which is how I like to read now and again—akin to pushing shuffle on my old iPod—I open the Catamaran Literary Reader’s Winter 2015 issue, begin perusing the poets first, as I am wont to do. There are so many I have yet to discover, which is simply to say it is a sea wider and deeper than any single reader-sailor can traverse. Still, it is a joy to sail, stumble upon poets flung like hidden archipelagoes in the vastness. Here is a poem by the Korean poet Han-Jae Lee, which strikes me as a perfectly crafted Zen poem where the spider is both itself, and the human dangling in wind, dreaming:

Cobweb A spider, all alone, is building a cobweb in the corner of the hamlet. His house waves in the breeze, shaded by a drift of clouds. Though it is only sounds and sunshine that he hauls up, he mends the net strand by strand, as if according to musical notation. Which line has to be installed first or last? How long? He is a skilled carpenter, humming to himself as he builds. “What stays where the winds have passed?” “How long will I have to wait?” Though it is only a shadow in the moonlight and on the morning dew, he is never giving up on his house. He continues to inhabit the garden where the sparrows twitter and the children chatter. The spider is conceiving a dream of a loving nest within the cosmos that hugs the sky, villages, and byways.

The poem reminds me of the Buddhist-Hindu notion of the Cosmos as the jeweled net of Indra, the web of interconnectedness with all things. Synchronistically, I was

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delighted to hear yesterday from my old friend Karina Lutz, who is the poetry editor of a new online magazine Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects influenced by the eco-Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy’s work. She’d like to reprint my poem “The Jeweled Net of Indra” (chosen by Adrienne Rich for a National Writers Union Award), saying it captures the ethos of the new project they are working on. Flick the cobweb we spiders weave, and you can feel it vibrate half way around the world.

Jeweled Net of Indra Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology— Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt, hands of a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble when the Nazi bombing relented—and if not for that war, would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio recount the birth of the child named Tsunami after the storm that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars I send to rebuild a village— minted with the Rosicrucian-eye above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls that we don’t know about—would I have known to send it, if not for the hands that flew the kite that drew electricity from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood and iPod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future— while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet

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sinking the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure for what burns—this illusion that anyone stands alone—stranded on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected vision of it all off.

Whether spider or hurricane, modern techno-industrialist or simply working with one’s hands (which a spider has many of), we capture and are captured by so much. In Han-Jae Lee’s poem, the spider’s “loving nest” it weaves across the cosmos is neither moral nor immoral—nor amoral—all of which assume a disconnected critique from one standing outside of things. In a non-dual world, it is all of these things, together, and none of them in mental isolation. In the Book of Equanimity, I meditate on Koan 15, where Kyozan and Isan banter back and forth about what’s going on “down south”, and Kyozan just sticks his pickaxe in the mud, as though to say “just this!” Isan replies, “in the southern mountains, lots of people reap thatch”, and the modern Zen teacher Gerry Shishin Wick comments:

Who are the other people, then, the ones reaping thatch? What about them? What about all the people who are suffering? What about all the people who are getting old, getting sick, dying? What about all the people who are going to work every day to support their families instead of sitting zazen like a solitary monk? Relating to this case, an ancient Zen poem says, “From the top of the solitary peak, I gaze at the clouds. Close by the old ferry landing, I am splashed with mire”… Realizing that there are innumerable sentient beings who are suffering, the whole body is splashed with mire. Pull up that mattock and go take care of them!

In Zen, it is both solitary peak and the busy, muddy ferry. It is indeed just this—plant your “mattock” pick-axe in the mud, right where you are. It is also about tending the larger muddy world. The Cobweb, and the Jeweled Net of Indra—we are entwined in this same glittering,

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dangerous web, where spider and wind and other beings become entangled, become food. We eat, and are eaten. Spin our homes in the air. Sometimes on mountain peak, sometimes in village mud. This planet is our home, for awhile. Might as well enjoy this dangling in the wind! To that end, I continue re-reading the mystic Jane Roberts’ work in Adventures in Consciousness, her eloquent language about the wonder of being alive at all, the miracle of each of us emerging, if you will, as a jewel in this miraculous net. She begins by looking at her husband’s face by candlelight:

It was almost as if I saw his face come swimming out of darkness into our reality, so full of life and expression, the most fantastic miracle of consciousness—a self forming itself from the universe, alive with brilliant focus—yet bound to vanish as mysteriously as it came. Like us all, I thought. For we’re caught between the triumph of our existence, and the anguish of our ignorance about what comes before or after. And if we exist forever in any moment, then why can’t we realize it? Yet even then I realized that our determined clear physical focus is, to some extent at least, dependent upon our forgetting. How can we experience the dear privacy of the moment if we’re aware of all of those other equally valid moments? And would we savor our hours in the same way or become glutted with them, drunken with excess? How valuable the physical senses are! They create the theater of perception through which we experience reality. They organize, categorize and pin down vast fields of raw data to form a three-dimensional living picture in which we are so intimately involved that we are “in” the picture we see, even without recognizing ourselves within it.

This poetics reminds me, too, of the Buddhist description of how our sense perceptions, and the mind’s interaction with them, “create” the world we experience. Of course, Buddhism flavors this realization with more of a deconstructionist model—rendering the seeming reality of the world as less solid than it seems; Western mysticism, as in Jane’s celebratory language, flavors this realization as a kind of miracle in itself. Which Zen also comes round to, in the falling cherry blossoms. Whether by deconstruction or celebration—preferably both, to provide “depth” perception in our seeing—there is this sense of the privilege of this moment each of us stands in. That it occurs at all. That one exists at all. Such awareness is a natural tonic for the dukkha of suffering when one measures this miracle and finds it wanting.

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Such estimation, of course, is its own miracle—and spur to even deeper awareness. Jane continues:

The body is a unique reality-forming organism; one that not only projects a three-dimensional picture outward, but is itself within the living picture of reality that it is constantly creating. The feedback is so flashing, so instantaneous that this escapes us… (we are) exploding in space like some odd animal-flower, blooming in many places at once… Enjoyment of physical sensation with its natural being-with-itness is one of our greatest delights and one of the best uniting devices, bringing body and soul firmly into their rightful relatedness. Physical joy and corporal motion set things right, putting the conscious self…in its proper position as it feels its soul alive in flesh, securely anchored in the support of its own creativity…

Zen, for me, includes an ever deepening poetic awareness of being—not just trapped inside the skull of a single ego, but swimming out into the very medium of being we move in without even knowing it. There’s nothing illusory or wrong about this water, or the nets in the water—in fact, by swimming out from the single skull of the isolated ego, so to speak, one can thrill to the visceral existential livingness of being. Both weaving and being caught in the webs that connect us. Roberts reflects:

Watching fish swim in water, for instance, you can see how beautifully equipped they are for their environment, and sometimes you can sense the fish in a different way, as a part of the water’s environment; each moving through the other. So man moves as naturally within space, with his appendages as suited to it as a fish’s fins to water, and the organism naturally takes basic joy in this interrelatedness. …

To know basic joy—this corporal triumph—as an organism delighting in the very medium we move through: life. Such language reminds me of two inquiries in Zen that John Tarrant likes to pose. What if it’s okay to be happy, to swim in this ocean rather than trying to escape it? And, what if Zen is just another word, another color of the sea that is so miraculous in its beauty and danger that there’s not really a word—even Zen—that can say it?

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The Mindful Life: Russian Ostyt &The Eros of Patience A mindful life is a busy life in its way, because there is so much to pay attention to. And if you’re a writer, there is the temptation to write about the nothing that happens. To begin with, there are the random readings as I roll out of bed. First, this month’s quotes from Rob Brezny’s Free Will Astrology column—a wise and hilarious juxtaposition, the words “free will” with the sense of determinism inherent in astrology’s assumptions. Regardless, it’s all a bit of Jungian beauty to me, and I like these quotes regardless of which sign they are attached to:

Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens, it is possible to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.

—Lillian Hellman, playwright I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

—Henry David Thoreau.

The poet Barbara Hamby says the Russian word ostyt can be used to describe a cup of tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool. Midway through the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin, the main character Dmitrii Nikolaevich Rudin alludes to a human problem, Do you see that apple tree? It is broken by the weight and abundance of its own fruit.

Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind. —David G. Allen Talent is a long patience.

—Gustave Flaubert, novelist

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Hope is a revolutionary patience. —Anne Lamott Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit. —Moliere, French playwright Waiting is erotic.

—Irene Nemirovsky, Russian novelist

There is an element of each quote that resonates this morning—the juxtaposition of patience, of waiting as erotic, and perhaps the key to not only the apple tree’s abundance, but its ability to bear the weight of its own creativity. That in a Zen way, there is always this Russian sensibility of desire as ostyt, that tea like life is often too hot or too cool as one walks between rooms, decades, minutes. That autobiography is a logical art. That over time our lives, like old paint, become transparent—scenes from earlier efforts interpenetrate, and we become all that we have ever been. Before I roll completely out of bed in the early light, I open to these passages from Thomas Cleary’s introduction to Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan. In light of my recurrent ruminations about both cosmos and ordinary human moments, I love Dogen’s unblinking non-dual eye here:

Dogen also speaks of enlightenment in terms of the universal being reflected in the individual; this “merging” of universe and individual does not, however, obliterate the individual or restrict the universal.

This leads to the apparent paradox of life being at once finite and infinite. One life, or one sphere of experience, contains everything that is within its scope and nothing that is beyond its range. At every moment we reach, or are at, the full extent of our experience; and yet this never limits the potential of experience in itself.

The flip side, in a way, of Russian ostyt might be a Zen version of the Three Bears, where each bed laid in is just right even as they are still awfully large, terribly small, or the perfect fit. Thomas Cleary continues his discussion of Dogen’s work:

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Each moment is complete, hence infinite, in itself, though it be finite as a point of comparison with past or future. In the Kegon philosophy, this interpenetration of the finite and the infinite is represented by the figure of “arriving in one step”, each moment of awareness being the focal point of the whole nexus of existence.

Each moment the focal point of the whole nexus of existence. The Eros of this—the apple tree breaking from the weight of its own fruit, as well as the Eros of winter with its bare branches. The infinite in each finite thing. Thomas Cleary ends his introduction with a classic Zen story about the necessity of embodiment, and not just philosophy:

A monk askes his teacher why he uses a fan if the nature of wind is eternal and omnipresent; the teacher replies that the student knows the nature of eternity but not the principle of omnipresence, and to illustrate this principle the teacher just fans himself.

Then, I rolled out of bed.

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The Millihelen of Beauty and All Possible Pain This morning, I read a poem by Matthew Olzmann entitled “The Millihelen”, which is a unit for measuring beauty—one “millihelen” the amount of beauty that will launch exactly one ship. Is it possible to despair at the beauty of such a poem? The answer is, yes. Rilke still does this to me regularly. The Zen poets Basho, and Ikkyu—where beauty and pain are not separate. But Matthew is a young buck from Detroit, teaching now in North Carolina, and several of his poems stunned me in the morning light before I could stumble downstairs for coffee—which may have been the problem. Never drink beauty on an empty stomach. This poem appeared in Drunken Boat 21:

The Millihelen

Everyone knows about the beauty that launches a thousand ships. Her hair unfurls like a flag and the navy, enflamed, will follow that flag until everyone is dead. There is power in that. We know. But what do we know about the power of the other, the one that launches “exactly one ship”? And what do we know of that one ship? It goes without kettledrums or cannon fire, without Achilles or Odysseus, without the blessings of the Gods, or even their scorn. No one notices. No epic poem will boast of its bravery, in fact, as it sails from the choked harbor, it sails straight out of history and into a night so unknowable, not even the blind eyes of Homer can guess where it will land. It would have been easier to stay with the fleet. There’s confidence in numbers. Consider the armada of stars as they burn heaven above us, so certain as they scorch their way through infinity. Why should they bother to track a single vessel among all the waves. I’ll tell you. In the story that launches a thousand ships, beauty is a destination, something to crash toward. In the story that launches only one, there is no destination, Beauty was there, among the wharves, with her

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simple scarves at the beginning. A sailor and his joy stepped from the pier and into the fragile boat together. Why was there only one? Because you, dear, said to the night, I don’t care about the rest. And I said, Neither do I. And then the harbor was behind us.

There is fresh language in contemporary poetry such as Olzmann’s. While not overtly “Zen” poetry, it is a poem feathered with its molting beauty. John Tarrant, Zen roshi of the Pacific Zen Institute, regularly utilizes a wide array of poems in his dharma talks and retreats, and rarely do they “reek of Zen” overtly. Rather, like koans, they evoke metaphoric experience that can open gates, launch journeys. Zen abounds with millihelens of beauty, and much of practice is solitary, conducted without fanfare, even when sailing together:

And what do we know of that one ship? It goes without kettledrums or cannon fire, without Achilles or Odysseus, without the blessings of the Gods, or even their scorn. The journey begins because Beauty was there, among the wharves, with her simple scarves at the beginning. A sailor and his joy stepped from the pier and into the fragile boat together.

I read, too, Brenda Shaughnessy in the Paris Review, reflecting territory familiar to most meditators when sailing the private mind:

All Possible Pain

Feelings seem like made-up things, though I know they’re not. I don’t understand why they lead me around, why I can’t explain to the cop how the pot got in my car, how my relationship with god resembled that of a prisoner and firing squad and how I felt after I was shot.

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Because then, the way I felt was feelingless. I had no further problems with authority. I was free from the sharp tongue of the boot of life, from its scuffed leather toe. My heart broken like a green bottle in a parking lot. My life a parking lot, ninety-eight degrees in the shade but there is no shade, never even a sliver. What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth? The throb lingering only in the exit wounds though the entries were the ones that couldn’t close. As if either of those was the most real of an assortment of realities—existing, documented, hanging like the sentenced under one sky’s roof. But my feelings, well, they had no such proof.

The poem’s first lines are astute, reflecting the mechanics of the reactive mind spinning private worlds of emotion that seem both real and unreal simultaneously:

Feelings seem like made-up things, though I know they’re not. I don’t understand why they lead me around… What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

Traditional Buddhist cosmology places our world at the exact center, the perfect middle, of all heavens and hells. It is the only terrain, so the story goes, where enlightenment can occur because of its exquisite blend of pleasure and suffering—because we too easily become lost in either extreme.

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If millihelens of beauty are not equally ubiquitous as all possible pain, we might never wake up. The Shaughnessy poem names the place we often launch from, but also find ourselves repeatedly in the middle of on these wild seas. Or landlocked and imprisoned, the ego’s feeling of persecution which is so provocatively described in these lines:

how my relationship with god resembled that of a prisoner and firing squad and how I felt after I was shot.

I love the line how I felt after I was shot, intimating as it does that we survive to tell the woeful tale of our own executions. The poem’s last lines leave us finally on the doorstep of Zen, But my feelings, well, they had no such proof. If millihelens of beauty were not equally ubiquitous as all possible pain, we might never wake up.

∞ Each generation of Buddhists and poets have a voice. Perhaps it’s hard-wired in the brain by the myriad invisible tools of nature and nurture, the élan vital invisible but pervasive in the language of each time period and culture—like sugar and salt dissolved in water. For me, poetry is a bridge to a Western Zen reflective of not only a contemporary voice, but an historical one too—as reflected, say, in Olzmann’s Odysseus, Achilles, blind Homer. Attending the Pacific Zen Institute’s Open Mind retreats, I’ve been struck by roshi John Tarrant’s use of old Greek myths and other ancient stories as a kind of extended koan to rustle the roots of our Western unconscious. Opening the door to what Zen might be if not only expressed in ancient Japanese or Chinese cultural trappings and literature. Hence, I find my own kind of native Zen in the likes of the much anthologized William Stafford. These lines from “Earth Dweller”:

It was all the clods at once become precious; it was the barn, and the shed, and the windmill, my hands, the crack Arlie made in the axe handle…

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Now I know why people worship, carry around magic emblems, wake up talking dreams they teach to their children: the world speaks. The world speaks everything to us. It is our only friend.

This is Zen with no foreign culture, only the common elements accessible to anyone who pays attention to the world and its speaking. Another poem from Stafford, so spare and emptied of ancient China, or Japan, yet not unlike them too:

It’s Like Wyoming

At sunset you have piled the empties and come to the edge, where the wind kicks up outside of town. A scatter of rain rakes the desert. All this year’s weather whistles at once through the fence. This land so wide, so gray, so still that it carries you free—no one here need bother except for their own breathing. You touch a fencepost and the world steadies onward: barbed wire, field, you, night.

The landscape of poetry and Buddhism continues to change at breathtaking pace—as with everything these days. It’s not just internet speeds, or the very existence of the internet, the way war is fought, food grown, each square foot of ground satellite- mapped. That I can text my children while they roam the earth, get a reply if I’m lucky in a matter of seconds. In this unprecedented time of rapid and exponential change, it is no wonder that language is catapulted ahead into new sensibilities, original tonalities and strange, morphing subject matter. It is the world we are straining to keep up with. Zen should be more comfortable in the exigencies of change than most. As with music, wisdom keeps coming round again. I was never so reminded of this as with hearing my children play the latest “indie folk”, which is already passé, or so I am told—but how it harkens back to the James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Crosby-Stills-Nash & Young they grew up listening to their old dad play on the guitar. I suspect

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language will never quite rest either. As the Buddhists describe, the Pali words anicca, the impermanent world, and anatta, the elusive self, are ever-changing, never still, never a finality. So let the new Zen come, with these millihelens of beauty and pain—enough to launch at least one ship, one poem, one life.

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A Koan of Light Woke in the early morning light, unable to sleep. Picked up one of the books I am enamored with, The Age of Edison—Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, by Ernest Freeberg. It is a poetic book, filled not only with astonishing stories, historical fact, but a sense of the grand sweep of invention ushering us into a modern world. He conveys a sense of the mythical import of light’s presence in society’s dark—akin to Freud likening consciousness to light illuminating the heretofore unseen regions of the psyche. A few quotes:

Electric lamps erased the ancient obstacles posed by open flames, shedding light where candles, oil lamps, and gas jets were of little use—from the deep recesses of the human body to the bottom of the ocean, from hairpins to uncharted polar regions, from baseball fields to battlefields. As people worked out the implications of electric light’s flexibility and power over the decades, they created a world not just brighter but illuminated, its public and private spaces carefully engineered to produce what one lighting specialist called “the moods and illusions” of modern life.

The 1881 International Exposition of Electricity held in Paris contained “wonders enough to have made our grandfathers doubt whether the reign of law in the order of the universe had not come to an end”, so astonishing was this explosion of human engineered light from the complex interactions of fine carbon, platinum or bamboo filaments in the vacuum of a bulb, summoned to light by chemical batteries or magnetic dynamos.

…a machine that could create enough cheap and powerful light to hold the night at bay was a breakthrough of a different magnitude, liberation from one of the fundamental and primordial limits imposed by Nature on the human will. The lights of Paris seemed a beacon pointing “toward a deeper wisdom, a freer, broader and purer existence”.

Though some, like the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson would presciently warn, “We must look deeper for our salvation than to steam, photographs, balloons and astronomy”. If there was ever an invention to illustrate the Buddhist wisdom of the interlinked web of Indra, or the Taoist sensibility of Yin & Yang’s unceasing flux of factors one into the other, this miracle of light may be it. Freeberg writes:

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A century and more after the late nineteenth-century explosion of technological creativity, we are the jaded beneficiaries of all the machines we have inherited from our inventive Victorian ancestors. We know more than they did about technology’s power to destroy as well as to liberate, and about the environmental costs that come with ever more powerful machines. On the other end of a century of mass production, we also see more clearly that human desires are insatiable, and that one of the defining characteristics of a modern industrial economy is the manufacture of artificial longing.

The insatiability of human desire coupled with our modern technological capacity to manufacture artificial longing illuminates Buddhist truth amped up on steroids. Still, nirvana is samsara, and samsara is nirvana. Form and Emptiness interpenetrate each other everywhere. Light and Dark are nascent inside each other, impregnate each other. This technological world of brighter and flashier lights evolving side by side with more complex darknesses is the body of the Buddha. Is none other than our body, our world. The bright moon in the dark sky—the sun and its shadows. Light has always been with us. It is a stunning story. Whether Big Bang, light bulb or candle flame, the lightning flash of a Zen moment, the fluorescent unreality of a cubical, Freud’s lantern of light, Buddha’s illuminating brilliance, or my own dull flashlight of a brain desperate for a new battery—it is all a stunning story. Are we awake in it? Every illumination, desire, invention—each solution a new puzzle to baffle. Are we self-luminous? Wax and wane as the moon? Are we black hole? Nova? All worlds in this moment. It is a koan of light.

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Zen and the Art of the Cosmos In modern parlance, you can always begin with Zen and the Art of…then insert any word, and voila! You have a bestseller, like the classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—about a man, his motorcycle, a road trip through America, the Zen of it all. Of course, there is now a glut of such titles: Zen and the Art of, well, just about everything—tennis, golf, archery, finance, writing. This could be sacrilegious buffoonery at its worse, or I imagine, just another example of a Zen master’s standard response in the koans to questions about Buddha mind. They didn’t have motorcycles or golf back then, so they’d look about for anything nearby and say Buddha is a bag of rice, six pounds of flax, or a shit-stick when too-serious monks asked. The latter image is always evocative, and puts in perspective the relatively tame nature of modern day depictions of Zen and the Art of… This morning, I find myself contemplating Zen, and one might say, the art of imagination. Every poet’s imaginary friend: this brain that creates worlds out of nothing. It is how we got here in the first place, I imagine. The traditional Buddhist tact on such things is that they are errant distractions from the path. No wonder, given the speculative philosophical obsessions of Hindu culture the Buddha was born into. The “Art of Speculation”, if you will, had become quite refined as sages described the eternal Atman every being is but a spark of, with our little atmans nested inside human bodies like baby gods. Someone had to bring balance to such a fantastical mess, so Gautama Buddha basically said never-you-mind about such unanswerable questions—I teach only about suffering and its end. That was good enough for awhile, it seems, till the Mahayana tradition and, my goodness, the Tibetans resurrected even more elaborate cosmologies about the Buddha’s many lifetimes, the endless cycles of eons through which we all inch along toward enlightenment. The imagination, it seems, is as intrinsic to human beings as it is, I imagine, to the One—who perhaps imagined us in the first place. Since I am not Tibetan, nor Hindu, the poet in the Zen of me is left with Western speculators, and so I turn to one of my favorites, the mystic and metaphysician Jane Roberts—one of her many books, Adventures in Consciousness. Zen must be here too, eh? Adventure, in consciousness.

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Perhaps this reverie will be Zen and the Art of Speculation. Or, imagination. Zen doesn’t bother much with such metaphysics, thankfully—sees them appropriately as distractions from the pragmatic matter at hand of waking now, here. Still, we are not “only” animals or plants, and being human includes the vast curiosities of this human imagination—so Zen must travel here too. It’s interesting, the Buddha took for granted the idea that entire human families, friends, villages, are involved with each other in different guises over and again across time. He just didn’t like to talk about it. While there is nothing in such imaginings essential to awakening—in fact it can indeed be a silly and profound distraction—exiling such concerns is no better. It would be like a painter failing to paint because it is not pertinent to Zen, or drinking tea, or working the garden, or playing with swords—ah yes, these too have been landscaped into the actualities of Zen practice. Along with golf, and tennis. Hence, I meditatively play in the art of metaphysical musings, which I’ve always been prone to, even when young. Ask any child, or rather, let any child ask you the endless questions they are prone to. Hopefully, Zen only deepens such questioning, as opposed to admonishing the child in us to grow up and stop asking. Zen likes questions more than answers. Maybe the wondering child in each of us is on to something. Imagination won’t save me from anything, I learned that long ago. But idiosyncratic predilections are part and parcel of who we are, and thus are part of what Zen is. Which is to say, Zen is so wide as to be all our livingness. Every stray interest. It is for me a way of being part of the mystery. Like being a poet. And, I’ve learned there are few things as off-putting (except politics of course) to fellow practitioners as disagreements over such talk. History is littered with their polemics. Each side of such matters view the other as heretics. Which must mean we’re each on to something. Some aspect of the elephant, as the story goes, as we blind seekers grab hold of a tail, an ear, a leg, a universe, and exclaim it is this and only this!

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So, I’ve learned I like to be a Zen contemplator of not only the moon, but the waxing and waning self, too. And God, as Void or multidimensional Buddha body we are part of—depending on your linguistic and cultural predilections. I find Jane Roberts’ language about All That Is refreshing, unclothed as it is with religious terminology, and always voiced with a doubter’s doubt, an artist’s sense of the proximate. But she’s also not shy about saying what she thinks. Here are a few excerpts, offered as a poetic approximation of Zen’s core questioning, What is your original face before your parents were born?

I’m convinced that the reason for our being is our being. This doesn’t make sense…if that being is preceded and followed by an annihilation or by a nirvanic merging and loss of individuality, however joyful. I find it difficult to believe that individuality exists only to be destroyed, and I insist that in our belief in personal identity, we may be closer to God than we realize. For God must honor individuality…As an event, God must still be happening…for in some way this world itself is a materialization of…creativity, and that creativity constantly continues. We exist in God’s newness, whatever our definitions.

While the Zen teacher and scholar Stephen Batchelor lobbies for there being no place for an “afterlife” in Zen, no sense of continued individual existence, still I find his description of the self as a kind of ongoing gestalt of complex factors—rather than an absence of true being per se—quite consistent with Jane’s language here. Consistent too with the Hindu notion of Being, and the general Mahayana Buddhist perspective (of which Zen is a part) that the whole damn mystery is quite beyond our reductive models of trying to say what does and does not exist. In a Western Zen, I almost don’t mind the word God creeping in like a good weed. What is your original face before your parents were born? At least Zen is comfortable with paradox, and promotes a reality that is inclusive of but beyond a simple yes or no to such questions. We each have to work out our own relationship to such matters. I’ve always said I’m a Buddhist by practice, and a Hindu by cosmology. As I believe the Buddha was—he just had to veer strongly away from the calcified Hindu cosmologies of the time to restore some balance and perspective

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to the whole matter. He was strategic, and smart. But he apparently still assumed the context of the Hindu framework against which to push. Jane goes on, in a manner that incorporates a “gestalt” perspective, a more dynamic sense of the eternal Atman than even the Hindus considered (the dynamism, as opposed to a static eternalism, is what Buddha was after). Feel free to replace “God” and “he” with whatever poetic identification best suites—be it Brahman, Goddess, Emptiness:

And whatever God is, he is not static or unchanging. To the contrary, such a concept of God denies him even the natural limited growth enjoyed by his creatures. What a cramped dimension in which to exist—perfect beyond all change or fulfillment; almost like a senile god with no place to go but down, living through his children and their accomplishments… If God gave us individual selves, he must be rather astonished to find so many so willing to throw the gift in his face. And without so much as a thank you. Just, “Take me back, Lord, I’m sick of being myself.”

This reminds me of the integral philosopher Ken Wilber’s insistence that it is an unmitigated marvel that individuated human consciousness has emerged at this juncture of evolution; and, that we seem so eager to get beyond it, understandable given the pain of such awareness. But that this fledgling, contingent, interdependent self is an unprecedented achievement (at least in the realm of our little universe), and should be celebrated. Then, transcending and incorporating the self into more complex and less egoic levels of awareness—capable of embracing this beautiful and brutal non-dual world. Not abandoned, not shed like a snake’s old skin—but more the way a child grows into the adult it becomes while never losing the child within. Maybe in a holographic universe the bit of individuality that emerges in the human reflects a similar, if multidimensional, quality in the larger scheme of reality. Jane continues,

I do believe that God “dissolves” in all…beings, and that we rise into consciousness and song because our individuality in itself is a part of any Godhead… Maybe our desire to know who God is puts us in the same position as some hypothetical unborn child who wonders where its mother is, and wants to see her face to face: We have to get born first. We may be inside what God is. The child’s birth puts it in the presence of its mother in objective terms, while removing it from its mother in a basic way, so that the

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child can grow on its own. So perhaps our seeming exteriorization is the same thing. So if we are inside what God is, conversely God may be inside what we are…Are we embryo consciousness then, infants in that respect, being spoon-fed one reality at a time?

I love this allusion. Humans as a kind of embryo consciousness, aiming toward enough differentiation from the cosmic womb to eventually see its mystery, and wonder. Perhaps as Brian Swimme says, we are the universe’s sense-faculty, the eye and imaginative sense-organ for looking at Itself in wonder. I feel less silly returning time and again to these themes when I realize how inescapable such ruminations have been across the centuries. It is a part of being human. Hence, the territory of Zen wonderment, too. What is my original face before my parents were born? What is this? What are we? And wonder we should. We were sure, once, that the earth was flat, surrounded by a dark bowl of pin-pricked light. Then, that we were the only solar system, then the only galaxy. When things continued to become truer than imagination, we at least thought no other stars or galaxies had planets. Now we know they do, and some that could be quite earth-like. Every few years now scientists astonish us with new wonders about the universe, even the prospect of multiverses—how utterly vast the whole thing is as to be beyond comprehension. Zen is mischievously a part of such discovery too, since we all are part of the 10,000 Things of Zen’s Taoist heritage, or by now, the Infinity of Things. The Kosmos, as the Greeks conceived of it—inclusive of its aliveness. This is what art, poetry, and science share in common: deep curiosity. What is this? In the old days, wandering Zen masters had only the moon, sun, and falling cherry blossoms to contemplate. What now, oh waxing and waning moon?

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Venus, Mars, Planet X, Red Dwarfs, Black Holes, & Your Original Face

Watching the documentary series, Cosmos—A Spacetime Odyssey, narrated by the eminent astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, I happened upon one of the latter episodes which describes the early solar system as having three planets—Earth, Venus and Mars—all with watery oceans and habitable terrains. This history is my history, since I am a citizen of this solar system—I feel like my therapy client discovering long lost family members, trying to update his family tree. As the scientific story goes, Venus’ volcanic activity went haywire, creating a sulphuric cloud cover that evaporated its oceans and turned its surface into a version of hell. But for the first billion years of our solar system’s 4.5 billion year existence, it was likely a Garden of Eden. Mars, too, it is now known, had wide seas and ostensibly vegetation before it too succumbed to natural processes that evaporated its oceans and turned its surface into the dusty red desert it is now. How’s that for a planetary koan? Tyson makes a passionate, but confident, plea to the viewer to make sure our human industry doesn’t turn Earth into either a dust desert like Mars, or a hot soupy cauldron like Venus. Oddly enough, one theory is that Venus will continue to evolve back toward its prior condition with clear skies and wide seas. Who knows, perhaps just in time for the remnants of our grandchildren’s grandchildren to voyage there and start over if we fail to treat Earth as a jewel rather than a factory. Would Zen be Zen on another planet? Is this itself a koan? Tyson also verified that Martian rocks were indeed found on Earth. How in the world did this happen? Why is this not just science fiction? Because reality is becoming stranger than fiction. Apparently there is now a well-known process by which rotating galactic clouds suck up, then spew out the remnants of not only supernovas, but the catapulted residue of rocks from planets hit by asteroids, which then become new asteroids that hit different planets and carry whatever life is hidden inert in their interiors till finally blasted apart on new ground. Scientists think this is one viable

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version of how life began here, on our own planet—seeded from life that used to abound on other planets, like Mars. This is what happens when you don’t watch science-programs on television, then try to keep up with this surprising universe. Perhaps this is a Mars koan…what if your life surprises you? What if your origin stories were different than you thought? The earth not flat. Your own life not flat. What if your original face is Martian, or Venusian? What if we’re more than we think we are? Or less certain? But right in our own solar system backyard, so to speak? Astronomers are mathematically sure—which is to be taken seriously since this same math puts satellites in delicate orbit and people on the moon and can track the existence, now, of planets in other parts of the galaxy—astronomers are sure that there is an undiscovered planet, Planet X, the size of friggin’ Neptune, that may have been nudged off course by Jupiter eons ago but still circles our very own Sun in an elliptical orbit every 15,000 years. Though its orbit will come no closer than outside the Kuiper belt of which our now dethroned planet, Pluto, is a part of. Scientists can’t actually see this new planet yet, still they know it is there—encourage anyone with a telescope to look, search the skies. Imagine that. What if our own lives are like this? What if we are living koans with unseen planets circling inside? I’d like to see what astrologers will make of this tectonic quake, so to speak, in our cosmic landscape. I need a new horoscope reading. A Planet X koan. Now, if that wasn’t enough to make me feel like those medieval priests intent on holding on to a flat world in a little static universe, scientists now know that most of the stars in the cosmos appear to be red dwarfs, unlike our own middling star called the Sun. Stars in our class will run their course in billions of years, then explode as supernovas—enveloping even a reclaimed Venus or Mars at that point. Perhaps seeding new worlds. Not to mention our eventual collision with the Andromeda galaxy, which will have unknown effects on our own Milky Way.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson wonders what kinds of civilizations might thrive in the vicinities of these red dwarfs. By burning less intensely, hence much longer, they are estimated to last trillions of years rather than billions, much longer than the cosmos has even been in existence. Perhaps with more time to develop civilizations that won’t destroy themselves. Or perhaps simply more time to fail over and again. Perhaps this is a koan too. My wife can’t bear to think of such things—gives her a headache. I eat such fare for breakfast every morning. Along with koans. I don’t really know why—just that I am a citizen of this cosmos, and want to better be a part of it all. Discover the endless new ways in which my world and reality are different than I’d thought, or even imagined. Even inside the tiny length of this fathom long body, which is its own world, its own universe. Zen is in the inquiry as much as the subject matter. No thing is off limits. At this rate, I can’t wait till we zoom through our first black hole—which by the way, we now know massive ones sit inside most every galaxy at their centers. Sort of like a person. But I’m just talking about a little ole’ average black hole, the kind that populate the universe with stunning ubiquity—including the existential black holes at the center of people. What might happen if we simply enter—a kind of gateless gate—see where we emerge, perhaps on another side of ourselves. Perhaps finding Original Face. It might necessitate a serious recalibration of our Google map coordinates. It’s one thing for Buddhism to become Ch’an in China, Son in Korea, Zen in Japan, whatever it is now becoming in America. What might Zen be stepping through the portal of one’s own black hole? What is my original face before my parents were born? Before the Universe was born? What now, oh waxing and waning moon?

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What is a Human Being? Poetry has been Zenning me again, as a kind of frisky verb. When I’m hungry, I read like a bear splashing for salmon in the stream. Tony Hoagland’s new book of poems, Application for Release from the Dream, is delicious in that raw sort of way—his oh-so-normal conversational style packed with politics and mystical moments. I am enamored, too, with his opening epigraph to the book:

The experiment failed; the lead did not change into gold. But the alchemist remembered the lute hidden in his closet. —Thomas Owens

In Hoagland’s opening poem, he asks What is a human being? What does it mean? It seems a crucial thing to know, but no one does. A good opening Zen gambit, in sync with the old irascible masters of China. In the next poem,

a woman with a henna rinse holds a small glass vase up to the light to see the tiny turquoise bubbles trapped inside. As a child she felt a secret just inside her skin, always on the brink of bursting out. Now the secret is on the outside, and she is hunting it.

This reminds me of John Tarrant’s description of how we often feel on the outside of things looking in—see everyone in the house by the fire, why am I outside in the cold? Or conversely, as in the classic allegory Pilgrim’s Progress where a man suddenly stands up, walks out his door to find what he’s missing. Here, a young girl feels like a secret on the brink of bursting out, then moves toward hunting it in the world. Is this what it means to be a human being? What if the experiment fails, and we cannot turn to

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gold? What if it doesn’t matter—but there’s a lute still in the closet with the music of us in its strings? To be a human being is to want so much. Perhaps like the Universe itself, given the trajectory of the Big Bang and the desire that is still making stars, dark energy expanding dark space filled with more dark matter and new stars, and us. Still, there’s a rhythm to these things—it’s not supernovas all the time. What is it that wants? In “Ode to the Republic”, Hoagland opines about this in our country, too, in the existent/coming humbling of America as old men read the Times in Central Park saying “Let France take care of it”, our country now a minor player, ex-bigshot, former VIP, drinking decaf in the nursing home for downsized superpowers. Is this what desire comes to? Where empires and universes and people end up? It’s certainly part of what young Gautama Buddha was exposed to when he escaped his father’s watchful eye, saw for himself old age, illness, and death. It is also what drove him to liberation. In the title poem, Tony Hoagland returns to his own brand of closeted mysticism when he says,

I keep the wise books on my shelves, and take them down to read, but I no longer believe in their power to transform. What is it? Maybe all the mystery anyone could want is trembling inside my abdomen already like the fine tremble of the filament inside a bulb.

This reminds me so of Zen’s basic inquiry: What is it? Not as impatient prelude to some answer, like a heroin addict for a fix, but as a stance of infinite curiosity toward everything, patient in the moments, living inside the questions. At the end of the poem, Hoagland finally says,

Exhausted then, I fell asleep; but I awoke, knowing the rules. If you aren’t learning, you have not been paying attention. If you have nothing to say, it is because your heart is closed.

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He steps out of the closet just enough to be seen in his bright Tibetan robes, before cloaking himself in irony again. Just like the old ornery Zen guys, or the Three Stooges. The past few days have also brought me to more of Bob Hicok’s poems, in Elegy Owed. He, too, seems a closeted Zen poet with his ephemeral lines that whack you in the head now and again. In “Soundscape”, he says

Is shimmer the word for seeming always about to break into song? Shimmering rocks, shimmering dirt, the shimmering sense that if I stopped wondering what follows this, I’d feel a part, not apart. All I’d have asked, my Incan heart removed from my chest, is that the priest hold it to my ear so I could hear myself inhabit the quiet.

Everything shimmers, particularly when we are in the cascading moments as they arrive, not leaning too far forward where we are apart-from rather than a part of. Our big Incan hearts ripped from our chests, yes—but in listening to its beating there is a palpable quiet in its daily sacrifice to what is. Or, as with Zen and Hoagland, what is it?

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Where Do The Words Go In a Dead Person? After a Costco run to get my Mom’s half blind, half deaf dog Nala more food and medication, I ventured out to see a movie, The Revenant. Haunting and lyrical in its brutal beauty, a wintry, wet earth dominates a wild frontier-boundary between trappers and native tribes. Ultimately, it is simply a movie about revenge and its emptiness—but such movies can be archetypal, like koans—this one embodying something of the ego’s quest to simply endure, get a foot hold, try to hold on to those you love. The morning after, the movie lingers in the gray and wind swirling outside my window. I watch a small brown bird kick up dirt beneath the lemon bush onto the stone path. I’d wondered who was responsible for this regular mess. Thought it had perhaps been a cat, or Nala. But it is a tiny brown bird, engaged in some mysterious behavior beneath the lemon bush. No different, perhaps, than any of us. I open to new poems from the poets I am spending time with these days. Sarah Lindsay’s poem “Ships of Gold”, about the man buried in a mountain, still alive after his fellow miners have all died. How the village, unable to free him, simply keeps him alive with baskets of food, a pillow and blanket, how children come to talk in the dark through the slivered portal between the rocks about their homework, “stories of travelers, dragons and beautiful women, three sisters, a river, a ring, white horses, wars and dooms and ships of gold”. Like us, buried in the caves of our own interiors, calling out each day from the rock mouth, Still there? Still there? Or her next poem, “The Leviathan of Parsonstown”, about the old 40 ton telescope in Ireland whose eye would take in the stars beyond Orion, till eventually the potato famine left the telescope abandoned, its gigantic mirror finally “melted down for war’s unbounded needs, leaving its blinded barrel mouth…” Haunting, the way earth’s capriciousness, entwined with human dis-ingenuities—landslides, famine, war—leave something in us blind and speechless. Still, is there Zen here too, inside our caves, inside our abandoned leviathans?

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Then, lines from Bob Hicok’s long prose poem, “Coming to life”, in which a young boy is made to touch his aunt’s corpse at a funeral, making death suddenly real and incomprehensible at the same time. He wondered, Where do the words go in a dead person…How later, he’d tell the story again:

She felt like nothing, he would tell a woman in college, their backs to the wall as they sat in bed. She’d asked what he meant by nothing. It was just that, as if in the silence of her skin, all possibilities had been taken away. But they had just made love and he didn’t want to bruise their warmth. “The opposite of this”, he said, putting a finger to the mole on her knee. The rest of the afternoon, it was as if someone had said to them, “Here are the brand-new bodies. Open them.”

Death and life, presence and absence, loss and its fortresses—when all possibilities had been taken away. Still, by leaning into rather than away from it all, it is as though life itself says, Here are the brand-new bodies. Open them. Then, there is the fable in Hicok’s poem “Ode to Magic”, where a king keeps wanting the magician to bring someone back from the dead, threatens to cut off his head unless he complies, but the queen says Perhaps this is just a poem. And the narrator says Everyone is alive as long as the poem is alive. So the queen finally asks the magician-poet again,

“Do the one in which your heart is folded over and pounded with moonlight, in which you claim to miss everything— I like how big your arms are in that one, your throat the size of the universe before silence gets the last word.” “Oh, that one” the poets says, “is this one, is the only one.” Listen to it sound like shucked corn, like a single blade of grass eating sun, like any train or noisemaker or hallelujah that will keep this line from being the last line, and this line but not the coming line, the hush, the crush it is.

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The poetry of contemplative living keeps me alive, and there’s really only one poem, the one I become. Till the crush of the last hush. Even then there is a kind of mystery. Where do the words go in a dead person…Akin, perhaps, to the Zen koan: But where does the One return to? In another poem entitled “Pre-planning”, about his parents’ deaths, Hicok asks:

…who will carry them and was yesterday the last I’ll see them with capable eyes, what leaves leaves the wonder of whatever resided a mist, a powder, certainly we are batteries, engines, storms, weather our whole lives…

Just now, Mom once again walks by my bay window hunkered down in the cold after her dog-walk, intent as always with her dim eyes to find Nala’s poop in the winter grass. She has her new lavender sun-and-rain hat on. It is a wonder: when we leave, what we leave, what we are: a mist, an engine, a storm? A tiny bird rousting the dirt. A heart folded over and pounded with moonlight, a throat the size of the universe.

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The Genjo of Jonas’ Whale, Ockham’s Razor, Violins & String Theory

It is a good life, this hurricane, the quiet center of it. An astonishingly privileged life, that we exist at all. This morning before rolling out of bed, I reach for Dogen’s Shobogenzo Zen essays, in particular the famous “Genjokoan”. The word refers to “present-being” as the essence of Zen. Gen meaning “present”, jo meaning “become”. Hence Genjo means actuality, being as is, at hand. This is the secret no-secret of Zen. Gorgeous and aggravating. Empty and continually filled each moment. Dogen says,

Acting on and witnessing myriad things with the burden of oneself is “delusion”. Acting on and witnessing oneself in the advent of myriad things is enlightenment.

The difference between the two is negligible, yet is like living in two different countries. The “burden of oneself” in the midst of this life of myriad things is so heavy—yet it is not one’s self, nor life, that is burdensome. In fact, witnessing and acting in the midst of these myriad complexities is enlightenment itself. Genjo, being as is, what is at hand. The koan of it. My life, then, a lot like Lynn Emanuel’s poem in her New & Selected book, The Nerve of It:

My Life Like Jonas by the fish was I received by it, swung and swept in its dark waters, driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks. Without any touching of its teeth, I tumbled into it and with no more struggle than a mote of dust entering the door of a cathedral, so muckle were its jaws. How heel over head was I hurled down the broad road of its throat, stopped inside its chest wide as a hall, and like Jonas I stood up asking where the beast was and finding it nowhere, there in grease and sorrow I build my bower.

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Bower is defined as “a pleasant shady place under trees or climbing plants in a garden or wood”. So Emanuel finds herself like Jonas inside the beast itself, the broad road of its throat, chest wide as a hall—yet finding the beast itself nowhere. Like life, we are so far inside it as to be no longer separate from it. It is here, in the grease and sorrow of this immense miracle, that one may still fashion a bower. The genjo of it. Then, I read Chard deNiord’s poem from his book Interstate, described by Natasha Trethewey as connecting “the state of knowing, in a worldly sense, to that knowing that is deeply felt yet unbodied. The precise attention to the ordinary things of the world…” Which, in its way, describes genjo too. Here is the poem:

Anchorite in Autumn She rose from bed and coughed for an hour. Entered her niche that was also her shower. Shaved her legs with Ockham’s razor. Rinsed her hair with holy water. Opened the curtain that was double-layered. Slipped on her robe in the widening gyre. Gazed in the mirror with gorgeous terror. Took out a cigarette and held it like a flower. Lit it devoutly like the wick of a pyre. Smoked like a thurible in the grip of a friar. Stared out the window at the leaves on fire, fire, fire…

Anchorite refers to a religious recluse, a person who has retired to a solitary place. Ockham’s razor, of course, referring to the Franciscan friar William of Ockham’s principle that the simplest, most elegant hypothesis is most true. We have W.B. Yeats’ widening gyre, referring to the image of a world “spinning outwardly such that it cannot recall its own origin.” And a cigarette “held like a flower”, lit as a funeral pyre, smoked like incense in the grip of a friar.

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Inside this poem is a Western Zen aesthetic akin to the eccentric poets & monks of Japan and China. The simplicity of Zen’s lens, like Ockham’s razor, as one puts on the one robe of this spinning world. Implicit in this widening gyre is the fire of our lives—like a flower, our own pyre, a kind of incense nonetheless. Finally, this morning, I discover For Dear Life, by Ronald Wallace. Which thrusts me into the widening gyre in celebration. We may be lost, but we are lost together, and Zen is our gossip, our music of it all:

String Theory I have to believe a Beethoven string quartet is not unlike the elliptical music of gossip: one violin excited to pass its small story along to the next violin and the next until, finally, come full circle, the whole conversation is changed. And I have to believe such music is at work at the deep heart of things, that under the protons and electrons, behind the bosons and quarks, with their bonds and strange attractors, these strings, these tiny vibrations, abuzz with their big ideas, are filling the universe with gossip, the unsung art of small talk that, not unlike busybody Beethoven, keeps us forever together, even when everything’s flying apart.

As John Tarrant says, waking up is something we do together. Like one violin excited to pass its small story along to the next violin and the next until, finally, come full circle, the whole conversation has changed. Even in the belly and bower of the whale of our impossible lives. This genjo a flower, a pyre, an incense, burning.

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An Incident of Beauty On solitary retreat overlooking the Tumalo wilderness near Bend, Oregon, my old friend Peter and I spend most days apart, but meet every morning and evening for meditation in The Hut. With its wood burning stove, Buddhas and horses, the elephant-god Manjushree, the variously toned bells, and the flies that nestle in the windows of the high eves, The Hut is itself a work of art where one learns to make of one’s life something more akin to art. If one is ever at risk in the labyrinth-of-mind while sitting in The Hut, one can center by looking at the wall fitted with an immense iron cog from an ancient gold mine Peter excavated decades ago in the old mining town of Mariposa. It is an odd sort of mandala, art both whimsical and ironic, girded with its spiked teeth on the circular edge, the six sections of the wheel filled with opaque pink stained glass, with a large clear crystal lodged in the wheel’s center. Last night, neighbor Jeb came over for a movie, as part of the retreat rather than a break in it. He operates a successful teepee manufacturing business on the property adjacent, is a marvelous artist of Zen inspired ensos, paintings, haiku and books. In tow were episodes of Harold Pinter’s theater productions, which had been meaningful for him in college as a way of confronting the stark hypocrisies and shallowness of post-war life in the 50’s; tonight he wanted to show us The Birthday Party. The Nobel Prize winning playwright Pinter was brilliant in his time, but this bleak tale of the psychosis of modern living mired in the primitive existential angst hidden in the psyche of the average post-50’s American did not make for good movie fare. No amount of popcorn or cookies could compensate. But it did make for long and raucous conversation after—everything from the continuing deficits of post-modern art and literature, to the sense that any New Age, Aquarian or otherwise, is still off in the distance. Whether as mirage, or a socio-cultural developmental stage so far beyond humanity’s current state of dysfunction, it was too hard to tell. But it was great fun, and practice in itself, to sit with the questions.

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Not your usual Zen fare, or is it? One of the earliest Chinese koans is the basic and essential, What is it? Perhaps a Harold Pinter play is as good a sensibility as any to bring such inquiry to. It is indeed a strange world we live in. This retreat, for me, is about including this world in the weave of practice. This morning, though, I have a psychic hangover from it all. Feel sad in some way difficult to name. Perhaps it was the movie. Perhaps it is the World. Obviously it is me. This is where Zen wiggles its hairy eyebrows, licks its big barbarian lips, jumps into the fray. I turn to the Ancestors, and read. First, there is this warning from Master Deshan:

Here there are no ancestors and no buddhas. Bodhidharma is a stinking foreigner. Shakyamuni is a dried-up piece of shit. “Awakening” and “nirvana” are posts to tether donkeys. The scriptural canon was written by devils; it’s just paper for wiping infected skin boils. None of these things will save you.

A confidence builder if I ever heard one. Still, this is what I love about the paradoxical traditions of Chinese Chan Buddhism, which became Son in Korea and Zen in Japan. If you look here for the secret engineering diagrams for enlightenment, you’ll be flat out of luck. The Chan tradition is more akin to art than fixing, music than a construction project. In this way, it allows in more of the world—especially existential angst, the melancholies of impermanence, the scandal of happiness, utilizing inquiry more akin to the Arts than a surgical meditation manual to treat this confounding state of the human. For the human is a great koan more than a problem or disease.

∞ So in the aftermath of last night’s Harold Pinter orgy of existential angst, and this morning’s inexplicable sadness, I open a poem. As a kind of koan—as a form of meditative inquiry. First, a bit of Sarah Lindsay from the poem “Aunt Lydia Practices Loving Komodo Dragons”, and how one may strive to embrace this ornery world:

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If I’m meant to love people, I should love everyone… I’ll start with Komodo dragons. First, love: not meaning lips and limbs, mush, or even understanding. This love is not a melting of self, a softened apprehension of the other… …a Komodo dragon. A vicious string of drool hangs from its jaw, sparkling in dry season sun. Its slit eyes follow the dying cow whose swollen hock it gnashed two weeks ago. A dragon’s chronically oozing gums nourish with blood the germs that poison its bite. (I’ll try to love germs later.) Let my soul embrace the creature that waddles forward to rip the skin from its fallen victim’s belly. Perhaps if I close my eyes… It’s easy to die on Komodo. Not enough rain. No plenty. No ease. And who wants to die? Wait—yes, here it is: love for the lizards, even the dark adults, the lame, the broken-legged, the breakers of legs, with their graceless gait and their stinking breath, who seek warmth in the morning and shadows at noon, who grapple unquestioningly with their lousy life. Meanwhile, their island is far from me; they sneer at no one, flaunt no opinions. Tomorrow with the newspaper spread before me, I’ll unclench my fists and try with people again.

Ah, life in Komodo, perhaps a stand-in for Earth, or as John Tarrant likes to call it, Koanville. Such a poem is perhaps a more nuanced, ironic but still compelling version of the Buddhist vow to love and save all beings. Sometimes such vows can seem perhaps too sweet, when a Komodo dragon is called for. Such a vow must bear the weight of the earth’s implicit violence, in all its naturalness and innocence.

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For the rationally minded who doubt the efficacy of ever achieving such an end, or those prone to distaste for too sentimental a wish in the face of the world’s brutality, the Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor reminds us such a vow is less a strategic enterprise measured for its success or failure, and more like becoming a sun which cannot help but radiate such warmth. To be as natural in such love for this world as it is for a Komodo dragon to be a dragon. There may be no solution for this confounding world. But this world is a damn good koan. A stunning, if difficult, poem. I turn next to Bob Hicok’s poem, “Elegy to unnamed sources”, where words fail to say the thing that wants to be said when someone is dying, yet as with Zen, the only worse thing is to fail say something. Here are a few of the lines:

Took a day off from breathing to see if that would be like talking to you. I’ve tasted your ashes twice, once today, once tomorrow. I study a dead tree that has a living shadow made of God and crow shit… If you see a man chopping down wind, it's me or someone who resembles me, with calluses and an untied anchor falling through the ocean of his body. A critique of the attempts to say a thing: Grief is punch-drunk stupid, that’s why we get along, we have the same empty IQ, the same silhouette of a scarecrow challenging lightning to a duel. A final attempt to say a thing: It was the worst decision of my life, to hold your last breath, to say anything out loud, anything in quiet, I should have left it to the professional stabbers in white, the professional pokers in squeaky shoes…

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I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.

Hicok’s poem echoes the Zen sense of holding both fullness and emptiness, and that we are sometimes the only bond between the two—even in the deep pathos of loss. Where apology and elegy and praise mix as a single koan. Zen loves a good story. Besides poetry, or calligraphy, koto music, good sword play, crumpled leaves on the rock garden, and so on, a good story like a koan can convey more than thousands of pages of scripture—however historically authentic—or encyclopedic categories of meditation techniques. There’s something of the non-dual in David Shumate’s following poem, where Eden and Earth and Komodo and California or Kentucky or Afghanistan is just another name for Koanville.

Those Days in Eden

I suspect Adam was the one who called the horse a horse. And Eve named the birds according to their feathers. Those were the days when fresh creatures kept showing up. A camel came lumbering down from the hills. Followed by a rhinoceros. She must have woken her husband up and pointed at the giraffe leaning its long neck over the fence, probing at the air with its foamy tongue. Surely the orchards hummed with bees. And worms glowed in the night-wet grass. I like to think that even back then there were artichokes. Though that is idle speculation. Fish still had their feet and came and went as they pleased across dry land. Monkeys were the first to openly mate, which the others came to emulate. The story of the snake has been overblown. And the apple either rotted or was eaten up by bugs. I suspect our mythical progenitors were never really banished. They simply packed up their suitcases full of fruit and left after the seventh season to set out on a little adventure, never knowing how hard it would be to find their way back home again.

I, too, suspect we were never banished from the one life. We’ve simply set out on a little adventure, perhaps to learn that the journey itself is home, as Basho says.

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This morning’s meditation has been its own kind of strange Harold Pinter birthday party, but with a little less alcohol and paranoia, a few more poems, and now: snow. Yesterday it was sunny, the sky shone blue, the clouds a cotton white in these Oregon skies. A few decades ago it was all existentialism and despair. Still is, every other day—the blue skies and the despair both. As Master Deshan says, None of these things will save you. But there is great incidence of beauty everywhere, even on Komodo, even here in the Eden of Koanville where we’ve set out on a little adventure together. Made of God and crow shit. Making this Zen vow to our own living:

…to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.

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Blue Jazz, Chess, & the Many Faces of Buddha

It is noon, and I am being Sick Buddha. The sun is brilliant, charming, seductive, the flowers and trees are four days into Spring. I am drawn from the couch to my walking meditation on the stone path in the backyard before ambling to the writing studio. Ecstatic—even though I am sick. This is actually a key, and core, Zen practice for me—Sun-Faced Buddha, Moon-Faced Buddha, as the koan goes. To embrace the 1,193 names for Buddha, even make up my own—all as a True Man of No Rank from Linji’s famous koan: coming and going through the never-ending alternations of health, mood, being. I used to fight being sick so passionately, hating the hazy mind, the fuzzy body. Now, it is one of my intimate koans. Perhaps, too, it is a small dialogue between body and world, the speed of it, the interconnectedness of all things. I practice finding a place in this body, in this mind, for life as-it-is in all its Suchness. In this vein, I pick Richard Wright’s Haiku from the stacks of books on my floor, see where I left off:

From a tenement, The blue jazz of a trumpet Weaving autumn mists. A night of spring stars: Waves breaking beyond the wall Have a dark blue sound.

Richard Wright was a black political writer, an ex-patriot who spent the last 18 months of his life in Paris foregoing his usual literature, writing close to four thousand haiku. An astonishing example of Zen sensibility, clothed in other than Japanese or Chinese culture. Timely, this blue jazz and dark blue sound that is my moody temperament in this inconstant self. Another name for Buddha. Ephemeral me, at the corner table, nodding my head, snapping thumb and finger in time with the rhythm.

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In the evening, after a day of being Sick Buddha – Well Buddha, I watched the movie Pawn Sacrifice, about the American chess master and troubled genius, Bobby Fischer. It’s stunning how many half-caught brain-fish swim up from encounters with books, a movie, sleep. The problem with writing is trying to land even a few—sometimes it is enough to know they are there, swimming in deep waters. But since I’m sick, with nowhere else to go, I cast a line in as though the movie were a koan. The Bobby Fischer movie is about the monumental Cold War chess tournament with the Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky. It entranced me in more ways than I can name. The unexpected, troubled genius lurking inside each of us. The almost mystical nature of chess theory, of the games themselves, a metaphor for life—the predictable moves, the unpredictable forays. The defined, finite board and pieces; the billions of strategies possible after only four moves. Fischer won the Spassky matches, the pivotal sixth game so tension-filled and brilliant that Spassky conceded, after being befuddled by Fischer’s unorthodox moves, by standing up and applauding him—which chess masters apparently never do to each other. Yet Fischer suffered, in psychological parlance, from a functional mental illness, paranoia, his genius also his undoing. Richard Wright, the African-American ex-pat in Paris was convinced the CIA was still after him—and as the bumper-sticker goes, You’re not paranoid if you’re right! Genius and its shadows, our relationships with others, with the world, is a tricky affair. At night, I had dim dreams of Zen as a kind of chess, the multi-billion moves possible in any day or moment—the 10,000 Things of the World, in Taoist imagery—evoking befuddlement or genius from anyone playing. The Chinese tri-partite image posits the Human halfway between Heaven and Earth, immersed in active contemplation of the ever-changing chessboards of the cosmos and the world, like a three-dimensional game—the sage, sometimes genius, sometimes fool, sun-faced then moon-faced. A True Man of a billion possible responses, finger to the wind, eye on the black & white squares, waiting for the intuitive move to emerge. The Zen of it.

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Blue Robe, Divine Wine, & Everyday Zen Mornings remind me of a world being born—emerging from dark dream, drawn toward light teasing from just outside the window. Then, standing on the wet backyard deck, sun streaming through green leaves of the Chinese Elm while the neighbor’s woodstove pipe emits a fragrance of burning pine and oak in great wafts of smoke, like dragon breath curling through the tree branches. I am prone, still, nearing sixty, to such moments of quiet mysticism. This fathom-long body open for the world to pour through. There is this privilege, too, of a quieter season of life after a big career, the raising of children who are now living their own marvelous, mysterious lives. I am sorting books again. Trying to bring some semblance of provisional order to my library in the back studio, as well as the burgeoning shelves adjacent my bed upstairs. From yesterday’s work, I have at least one token cardboard box filled with books I am deciding to offer back to the universe, via used book stores, family or friends. There will likely be a couple more boxes. But I love my books, the heft of them, the history inside, the urge so similar to mine to say something about this life we live. This morning, I rummage through the opening pages again of The Drowned Book – Ecstatic and Earthy Reflections of Bahauddin, the Father of Rumi. The world now knows of Rumi, thanks in large measure to the translator Coleman Barks. And Rumi had a father, like my children have me, like I have mine—and Rumi’s father was a mystic in his own right. I am drawn to the introduction, as it reflects another angle, perhaps a Sufi angle, on the contemplative writing I am exploring via this Japanese zuihitsu medium (see my opening Preface). Here is Coleman Bark’s first paragraph:

The book introduces readers to a document known as the Maarif, written by Bahauddin Valad (1152-1231), father of the mystic poet Rumi. The Maarif is a collection of visionary insights, questions and responses, conversations with God, commentary of passages from the Qur’an, stories, bits of poetry, sudden revelations, medicinal advice, gardening hints, dream records, jokes, erotic episodes, and speculation of many kinds. A mystical compost heap…

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Many of these topics ferment in the compost heap of my own writings, absent medicinal advice and gardening hints. But sudden revelations, bits of poetry, eros, speculation, and conversations with God—yes. Here is Bahauddin’s opening Maarif 1:1 – followed by a sampling of others:

Blue Robe I have been given a taste for what is beautiful. Like milk running through my body, the gates open. I wear a blue robe woven of six directions with watercolor images flowing over the cloth, a thousand kinds of flowers, yellow jasmine, wild iris. Orchard corridors, handsome faces on the street, I am composed of this beauty, the attar of pressed plants, rose oil, resinous balsam: live essence, I am the intelligent juice of flowers.

One Of The Ways God Tastes I see a long table spread with a tablecloth. On it are the powers and qualities and creations, the seven stars from which flow our pleasure here. Even in my unconsciousness, God enters my desire and my soul with the taste of those qualities. I feel myself becoming one of the ways God tastes.

This Cup Of Seeing, My Wine I sit in front of God, moaning and grieving and praising, finding new ways to show my love, like songs being sung to a rebeck, then tambourine and ney, then the music of all three. Every moment this cup of seeing fills with vision. This is my wine. I drink the given moment, and through my limbs and trunk and head the blooms are opening. This is health. Any other feeling, disease and deadness.

There is something universal in this mysticism, of opening to a world one sees as if for the first time, yet has been here all along. The world, and one’s living, one of the ways God tastes. Moaning, grieving, praising—it is all music.

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In another vein, as I move Zen master Charlotte Joko Beck’s book Everyday Zen to the back studio library to join my other Zen books, I read her succinct responses to a 1998 Tricycle interview in the back of the book—a nice contrast, in its way, to the lovely excesses of Rumi’s father quoted above.

At one point I had a little breakthrough or “opening”—which I now think is a waste of time, but at the time, I thought it was important… Just a sense of everything being whole and complete, with no time or space—no “me”—that sort of thing. It was terrifying! And I was furious. I went in and threw something at Soen Roshi. (Laughs). He ducked. I said, “You mean to say we sit and struggle and struggle just to realize this—that there’s really just nothing at all?” Because I didn’t really understand. He said, “Well, it’s not terrible; it’s just astonishing.”

I love Soen Roshi’s response, it’s not terrible; it’s just astonishing! No big deal. Just the ordinary miracle of being. The Tricycle interviewer next asks Charlotte Joko Beck, “You think it’s a waste of time to have a breakthrough?” She responds:

Not a waste of time, but it’s not the point. It doesn’t mean you know what to do with your life. You can sit for twenty years and be wasting your time. What I’m interested in is the process of awakening, the long process of development, which may, or may not, have breakthroughs as natural fruit. What genuinely concerns me is the necessity for a student to learn to be as awake as possible in each moment. Otherwise, it can seem as if the point of practice is to have breakthroughs.

One taste, many flavors—the everyday world becomes miraculous, the I am composed of this beauty ordinary in its daily occurrence. I love both of these marvelous companions, Bahauddin Valad & Charlotte Joko Beck—the Sufi becoming one of the ways God tastes, the Zen master sitting in her San Diego house living the ordinary life of a suburban American. It’s not terrible, it’s just astonishing!

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Diamond Street Sutra in San Francisco Things I saw today, walking in the heat of the morning to move my car to Diamond Street:

An elderly Japanese man rummaging in the recyclables on the curb opposite our front porch—he looks up apprehensive, but when I just smile, he relaxes and grins big in return: “thank you, thank you!”

The sky is almost too blue to bear, but I do. The sidewalks, filled with old leaves, newspapers, is a noble path. After re-parking the car, I wander into St. Philip the Apostle Church, on the corner of Elizabeth & Diamond streets, am alone and so happy. Thinking how brilliant it was for the laity, centuries ago, to insist the goddess return in the guise of Mother Mary; then further muse, in my eccentric way, how God sent his only son to ask forgiveness of us for our unforeseen suffering, here, like any parent might; how baby Jesus sits in Mary’s arms as the wise, innocent genius that got us here in the first place, and will see us through. How comfortable I always feel inside these walls of marble and stone, the filtered light through stained glass, despite the archaic language in the hymnals, the perversity of the mass’ incantations, how easy it is for me to imagine Buddha in the stained glass, in the silences, or me for that matter. How it is the stone and light and silences that draw me, regardless of the religion, the liturgy. How thankful I am, in this modern age of locks and paranoia, that Catholic churches still leave a door open for the wandering mystic, like me, to enter in. After, walking back to the flat down tree-lined Elizabeth Street, I muse on the centuries of bad and good mixed in the histories of church, religion, civilization—how according to psychology, one of the earliest developmental stages each human faces in infancy is the “good/bad mother split”, that initially we all think there are two mothers: the good one who brings the breast to our mouths, the bad mother who withholds it. Most religions, civilizations, humans, hold onto this split in some fashion, through insisting there is a devil, an enemy, a wrong view or person. But as in Zen, each human being spends a lifetime working out that there is only one mother, one world—that the good and bad mother

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is the same, your beloved. While the child must integrate the two, initially, enough to continue becoming a person, the person still spends a lifetime with this paradox, this koan. It is akin to embracing the world in a “non-dual” manner, the secret (that is no-secret) of Zen. How I hold these two “mothers” in my own heart determines so much—how split the world remains, how whole.

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One Bowl, One Boat, & The Whole Enchilada This morning, I look out the windows toward Noe Valley hills dotted with Victorian and adobe homes, greet the silver Shiva statue dancing the wheel of life in the corner of our temporary flat, settle into the grand old reading chair with coffee and Greek yogurt. Open to the Book of Equanimity’s Koan 39 – Joshu’s Bowl-Washing:

A monk asked Joshu, “I have just entered the monastery. Please, Master, instruct me.” Joshu said, “Did you finish your rice gruel?” The monk replied, “I have finished eating”. Joshu remarked, “Then wash your bowls.”

A famous koan, pointing one towards the presence of the whole universe in the ordinary passing of moments. It is here, and not elsewhere, that I find my life ever available, ever present. In the re-parking of both cars (my wife’s and my own) on San Francisco’s streets so as not to get ticketed, in the pleasure now of this onion bagel drizzled with honey, old Zen masters miraculously still appearing centuries later on these pages to hang out with me, chew on words together like old cows, as though there were nothing more important or pleasurable in this wide universe. Gerry Shishin Wick, the modern Zen commentator, says of this koan:

It is to lead an ordinary life, just as it is, ordinary—and that is truly extraordinary. But we must not confuse a Zen life with a “Zen-like” life, a life that conforms to our ideas of what we think Zen should be, and a life in which we try to act like a “Zen student” or, worse still, a “Zen master”. In this koan, Joshu is telling us just to let our life express itself and naturally come out in all our activities. Do not let the word “Zen” delude you. Intimately realize that Zen is nothing other than what you do, and what you are, morning, noon, and night.

The word Zen means whole—it is this whole damn enchilada. Which brings me next to Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, his essay “Zenki”, which translates as The Whole Works. I am steeping the little tea bag of my mind in Dogen’s

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subtle language, language that itself has been deemed to usher one into the very essence it seeks to describe, if you can follow it. Thomas Cleary, the translator, says this idea of Zenki, or rather this experience, is considered the “crown” of Kegon Buddhist metaphysics and the Mahayana Buddhist dialectic (of which Zen is a part). A fancy way of saying that all things exist inter-dependently, that each thing (including us) is simultaneously a “hub” in this conditional nexus, as well as having no independent reality apart from the whole. Each of us is a whole damn enchilada, as well as being part of the great enchilada we exist inside of: it is One Taste. It reminds me of the astronomical observation, that from the vantage point of any galaxy, it is the center of the cosmos—as each galaxy is. Or in existential psychology, the power of the subjective “I”, that each born-ego is its own little galaxy, is in a way the center of things; integral psychologies also posit that we simultaneously exist also as part-of the whole. Ken Wilber’s notion of the Holon is an example of this, each entity being both part and whole. Master Dogen seems to have been on to something later thinkers continue to explore. He coined a strange and cool phrase, The Mystery of Principal and Satellites. Each of us both prime principal in our own being, as well as satellite to all other elements. The “mutuality, the complementarity, of the elements…makes them functionally what they are.” What I am. Not separate-from, but nonetheless my own center. And what am I? Master Dogen likens us to a boat:

Life is like when one rides in a boat: though in this boat one works the sail, the rudder, and the pole, the boat carries one, and one is naught without the boat. Riding in the boat, one even causes the boat to be a boat. One should meditate on this precise point. At this very moment, the boat is the world—even the sky, the water and the shore all have become circumstances of the boat… For this reason life is our causing to live; it is life’s causing us to be ourselves…We that are life, life that is we, are the same way.

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Without the “hub” of beingness, the boat and life itself is naught. The act of being a human being “causes” the boat of life to be what it is, and one rides the waves that rise up to meet us. We are causing life to be as much as life is causing us—mutually penetrating and creative. Full of enchiladas to eat, bowls to be washed, boats to sail. Delicious, messy, uncharted. We that are life, life that is we…a wild ride!

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The Five Gene Game, Under the Big Sumerian Moon

Up early, unable to fall back asleep or truly wake up. I take this muddy body and bleary brain to the big chair, watch sun play over the Noe Valley hills, open poems. From Jane Hirshfield’s “How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort”:

Five genes, in a certain arrangement, will spend this life unrooted, grazing. It has to do with how the animal body comes into being, the same whether ant or camel. What then does such unfolded code understand… the way they keep trading places, grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living. Last night, the big Sumerian moon clambered into the house empty-handed and left empty-handed, not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around, shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor…

Five genes in a certain arrangement, that’s me. And the question is appropriate: as the code of me unfolds, what is it I understand? Only that all things keep trading places. The big Sumerian moon of my inner life shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor of me. Hirshfield, in another poem entitled “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights”, says:

In daylight, I turned on the lights, in darkness, I pulled closed the curtains. And the god of More, whom nothing surprises, softly agreed…

This god of More, this Big Sumerian Moon, these Five genes in a certain arrangement…the koan of what I am this morning. Every morning. Tony Hoagland, in his poem “Controlled Substances” has something to contribute, about the addiction, so to speak, of desire, like money which teaches you to strangle time, or the narcoleptic trance of a small lit screen, the wish for a concerned voice to ask, Does

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someone you love have an information problem? Addicted even to sadness, that perennial, universal experience Buddha speaks so eloquently of—Hoagland wonders,

Why don’t they break down my door right now and arrest me and send me to a rehabilitation program for using sadness as a substitute for understanding?

I hear my Zen teacher, John Tarrant, wondering out loud if it isn’t too easy, just habit, to be sad—if happiness, which is often right under one’s foot, isn’t the more reality-based sensibility. Yet it is so difficult sometimes, as for me this morning, to approach happiness directly, as the five genes knotted-up-as-me blindly loll about trying to wake yet again. Sometimes, happiness edges in or out the back door of the psyche rather than marching through the too obvious front door, as in David Shumate’s poem:

The Tang Dynasty After a career of composing verses in the royal court, most poets of this golden age snuck out the palace’s back door and ran away to the mountains. As if life were one long game of hide-and-seek. They had simple names. Wang Wei. Tu Fu. Li Po. They drank whenever they liked. And gave in to slumber if it subdued them. When they awoke, they took walks along the mountain paths. Then raised up the pen to render this complex world simple again. So much was sacred back then. Rivers. Gulls. Frost. Deer. Chrysanthemums. Women who lay awake in the night. Friends arriving in the afternoon with baskets of vegetables and mint and a bottle of wine to share. That age has long since passed. Though they left behind much to emulate. It’s easy to find the front door. Signs are plastered everywhere. But you have to feel along a dark wall to find the latch to lift that will get you out the back.

This work of staying awake, of waking again over and over to my life, includes the grand front entrance as well as the shady back porch leading to the dark forest—where the god of More sits under that Big Sumerian Moon playing the game of Five Genes…am I ant or camel, answer or question? What then does this animal body, this unfolded code, know? What is this?

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Perhaps sadness and happiness are part of the same code, the same lingua franca as a common language adopted between speakers whose native languages are different—such as the mixture of Italian with French, Greek, Arabic, and Spanish, formerly used in the Levant. Or sadness and joy, equanimity and pathos. In the Blue Cliff Records, Koan 40 includes this verse:

How subtle it is! The seeming and the real intermingled. How surely it’s thus! Everywhere to be oneself.

Master Ummon says to Kempo, “Your answer, please, sir!”

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Waking To A Strong Poker Hand

Another book has been saved, as I move them from one shelf to another past the gaping mouth of the cardboard box ready to spirit away the books I think I may never look at again. I am keeping this book—The Best American Spiritual Writing 2006— because, at random, I opened to an essay entitled “Waking” by Linda Hogan, a Chicksaw novelist, essayist, and poet, taken from Parabola magazine. It is written after an accident she was in that involved a head injury, with the subsequent fuzziness of memory and consciousness she experienced. It is a stunning, lyrical account of aging in general—how the mind and language may shift—but also how awareness can be more acute in other ways. As in, waking to this world, to a wider spectrum of living. The way Zen can follow one through any condition of mind or body. Here’s a few passages from Linda Hogan’s essay:

Daily something is lost from me. It began with an accident I don’t remember, an impact to my head, a woman finding my body in the road…I was going to live, and live with memory loss. Important events vanished from my memory. Some didn’t. It was random. I forgot neighbor’s faces. I remembered some small detail of a poem. Rumi: “Break the wine glass and go toward the glassblower’s breath.” The names of the wildflowers in bloom around my house would be gone. What I told someone I told again and again. What I asked, I repeated. Words were gone. I searched for them, coming up with things similar until someone guessed…

Helps me be more open to what seems like the dimming of awareness I see in my mother, that I see in friends aging right along with me. Changes in awareness which may have its own lens, its own apertures. For instance, Hogan describes her awareness after the accident:

But my body even without words, knows this world, every morning the first morning. I watch the light move, lengthen. Daily there is beauty. The wildflowers still exist, even nameless…Pleasure. I listen to the thunder, look at the dew in the flowers. There is joy even in such vulnerability, such fragility. There is even happiness.

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I am often astonished at the presence of joy in the most unlikely of places—a nursing home, a poor neighborhood, a “Third World” country where citizens sometimes have yet to lose appreciation for life’s original joys: family, community, culture. How happiness does not often follow escalating wealth or even pristine health—it is its own mystery.

Awakening isn’t always to a state of enlightenment…I can’t say I know what it is. I can’t say I understand the boundary, the skin, between the worlds we may journey or where I now live…Something else owns this mind, this awakening, and it is a mystery, as if the soul lives larger than the human knows or thinks…

As John Tarrant says, Zen is as much about endarkenment as enlightenment, including more nuanced shades of shadow and light than brilliance alone. Allowing life to be larger than our attempts to make it small, manageable.

It is an infant life, too soon to tell what it will become but I trust it is a sacred beginning like all beginnings. Sometimes you drink from an empty bowl thinking it is full and it is. Sometimes you open your empty palm and receive. The world is always fresh. Sometimes there is morning with birds and the sound of a running horse and you are awake.

Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind—an empty bowl, filled with…?

∞ The next essay to catch my eye is entitled “This Soul Has Six Wings”, by Jessie Harriman, originally published in Portland. It is about mysticism, among a group of contemporary women, and a glimpse into the thirteenth-century Beguine mystics who were ordinary lay women of their time living together against the backdrop of war, and the oppression of the Catholic hierarchies. The opening paragraph by Harriman reminds me of Zen teacher Joan Sutherland’s description of metaphorical language as being at the root of Zen koans:

The way I see it, a mystic takes a peek at God and then does her best to show the rest of us what she saw. She’ll use image-language, not discourse. Giving an image is the giving of gold, the biggest thing she’s got. Mysticism suggests direct union, divine revelation, taking a stab at the Unknown with images, cryptic or plain, sensible or sensory. A mystic casts out for an image in whatever is at her disposal and within

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reach, like a practiced cook who can concoct a stew from the remaining carrots and a bruised potato, or like a musician improvising with buckets and wooden spoons. She does not circumvent; she hammers a line drive. A mystic is a kid finding kingdom in ash heap.

Like any good mystic, Zen masters also cast about for “whatever is at her disposal and within reach”, koans often pointing toward Buddha nature in a bag of rice, flax seed, cherry blossoms, or the leftover carrots and bruised potatoes the cook in the monastery might improvise into a good stew. That these thirteenth-century women were often the disenfranchised, yet found gold in the devastations of daily life, encourages me to go deeper into my own practice. The Beguines, after thriving for a time on the outskirts of Europe’s cities, eventually had their books, then their bodies, burned, their communities disbanded by the unforgiving Inquisition. The author recounts her own glimpses of tragedy, too, in the ordinary lives of those around her—a house lost to fire, cancer, joblessness. Yet, the mystical urge is to still play, and Harriman wonders:

Is a mystic anyone who realizes a truth and flashes it like a strong poker hand?

Today, there are perhaps other challenges for the mystic, the author muses:

Today I don’t suppose she fears the Inquisition and its fire—just dullness, just missing it. She fears dismissal. She wrestles, she squints the eyes of her soul…There must still be something worth saying, worth pointing to.

Such as this essay from Jessie Harriman, and the thousands of lost Beguines. Even my own lost life, found in the koan of these mystics. Flashing my own poker hand—however hazy my mind, or inconstant my fortune!

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The Zen of Loki

There is another remarkable essay in the Best American Spiritual Writing – 2006, by the New York Review of Books writer Michael Chabon: “After Strange Gods”. In his wonderfully urbane yet informal language, Chabon recounts the impact of Norse mythology on the psyche of the eight-year-old boy he was, and the grown man he now is—making the point that the world is both dark and light, that we are too, and that it can really be no other way. Thus, it is part of growing up, of embracing the enigma present in both human and divine realms rather than splitting the world in two. Which is so consonant with Zen’s non-dual aha! Chabon enumerates the graphic images he culled from biblical and Greek myths as a young boy: “rape and murder…revenge, cannibalism, folly, madness, incest, and deceit”; Joseph’s brothers enslaving him to Ishmaelites then soaking his coat in animal blood to horrify their father; Orpheus’ head, torn off by a pack of raving women, then continuing to sing as it floats down the Hebrus River. Chabon opines, this was great stuff! Not only for his eight-year-old boy mind, but also his mature soul. He says,

I was drawn to that darkness. I was repelled by it, too, but as the stories were presented I knew that I was supposed to be only repelled by the darkness and also, somehow, to blame myself for it. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment, the imperative to work and sweat and struggle and suffer the Furies, these had entered the world with humankind; we brought them on ourselves…we were meant to understand the world had begun with light and been spoiled. Thousands of years of moralizers, preceptors, dramatists, hypocrites, and scolds had been at work on this material, with their dogma, and their hang-ups, and their refined sense of tragedy. The original darkness was still there in the stories, and it was still very dark indeed. But it had been engineered, like a fetid swamp by the Army Corps, rationalized, bricked up, rechanneled, given a dazzling white coat of cement…What remained was a darkness that, while you recognized it in your own heart, obliged you all the same to recognize its…being wrong, particularly for eight-year-old boys.

Chabon describes then what the Norse gods offered him, that neither Bible nor Greek myth could provide:

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Here the darkness was not solely the fault of humans, the inevitable product of their unfitness, their inherent inferiority to a God or gods who—quite cruelly under the circumstances—had created them. It is a world conjured against darkness, in its lee, so to speak; around a fire, in a camp at the edges of a continent-sized forest, under a sky black with snow clouds, with nothing to the north but nothingness and flickering ice. It assumes darkness…

He is taken by the story of Odin’s relationship with Loki, “the worst (and most appealing) creature who ever lived…the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous World Itself.” Loki is that spark, the infuriating and tragic part of life—whether human or cosmic—that makes life itself possible. Loki is,

Ally and enemy, genius and failure, delightful and despicable, ridiculous and deadly, beautiful and hideous, hilarious and bitter, clever and foolish…a book whose subtitle might have been “How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About.” Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them. And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.

The Norse had, in this way, perhaps a more integrated relationship with the devil in their world. I’ve always been a fan of the quasi-Gnostic notion that Lucifer was the brightest, most brilliant angel, a genius if you will, whom God hoped would inject creation with a bit of moxie, an element of surprise, of unpredictability. Which involved, then, a Fall…so the World could happen—and could happen with more genius than any static Eden could conjure from such placid beings. Our classical Greek-Roman-Christian inheritance has often been about splitting what is devil and what is angel, chaos from order, the dark from light. I am so struck by Michael Chabon’s Norse mythos here, how akin it is to the Chinese Taoist sense of life being an ongoing dynamic between kindred forces of light and dark rather than ultimately a war between them, which only one side can win. In Zen too, Form and the ever-mysterious Void are in constant interrelatedness. In both Taoism and Zen, we as human beings are complicit in and with this mystery—not set apart from

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it. Nor splitting the dynamism in two, which would lug the cosmos to a grinding halt. A kind of Lobotomy, on a divine scale. Chabon ends his essay with the following reflection:

We all grew up—all of us, from the beginning—in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world both ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, it seemed a little more true than usual.

This is another way of speaking Zen, for me—the Western threads that make for a

colorful robe—Zen’s One Robe.

Which includes Joseph’s robe of many colors, soaked in blood and grief, yet like he,

favored for our innate beauty and genius. Even Loki, the part of me that is both

mesmerizing and hideous, baffling and luminous—perhaps each of us, the koan of

Loki.

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An Ordinary Human Being In the Book of Equanimity, Koan 28 “Gokoku’s Three Shames” is a wonder. A monk asks the master three questions, each representing a stage of practice:

When a crane stands upon a withered pine, then what…alluding to the stark beauty of Emptiness at the top of the spiritual tree, so to speak. When dripping water freezes, what then…alluding to the monk’s ability to stop all mental and physical activity. At the time of (Emperor) Esho’s persecution of Buddhism, where were the gods…alluding to the year all Buddhist monks and nuns were forced back into lay-life, and 4,600 monasteries were destroyed.

To each, Gokoku responds It’s a shame, as in it’s a shame to get stuck in any one condition—however beautiful, however terrible—because one misses the ever-changing nature of life. Another Zen master comments:

When the ice melts, it exposes the dead body within. I love this image—how easy it can be to deaden ourselves by trying to attain too stable, or frozen, a realization. Or Master Bansho’s wry comment about the monk comparing his attainment to the crane’s beauty on the withered pine:

This monk took this little bit of scenery and stuck it on his forehead, showing it to everyone he met…

Oh to be an ordinary human being—as long as I don’t slap such attainment on my forehead, make it a bumper-sticker for my car! Crap (an old Buddhist term), I just did that with my little book, didn’t I?

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Bibliography

Alexie, Sherman (Guest Editor); Lehman, David (Series Editor). Best American Poetry – 2015. Scribner Poetry. 2015

Bahauddin; (Barks, Coleman; Moyne, John; Translators). The Drowned Book – Ecstatic and Earthy Reflections of Bahauddin, The Father of Rumi. Harper San Francisco. 2005.

Beck, Charlotte Joko. Everyday Zen. Harper One. 2007.

deNiord, Chard. Interstate. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2015.

Dogen; Cleary, Thomas (Translator). Shobogenzo – Zen Essays by Dogen. University of Hawaii Press. 1991.

Emmanuel, Lynn. the nerve of it – poems new & selected. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2015.

Freeberg, Ernest. Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. The Penguin Press. 2013.

Hicok, Bob. Elegy Owed. Copper Canyon Press. 2013.

Hirshfield, Jane. The Beauty. Knopf. 2015

Hoagland, Tony. Application for Release from the Dream. Graywolf Press. 2015.

Lindsay, Sarah. Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower. Copper Canyon Press. 2013.

Mitchell, Stephen. Meetings With The Archangel – A Comedy of the Spirit. Harper Perrenial.1998.

Roberts, Jane. Adventures in Consciousness. Prentice-Hall. 1975

Shumate, David. Kimonos in the Closet. Pittsburgh Press. 2013

Sutherland, Joan. Acequias – Miscellaneous Writings on Koans. 2013.

Wallace, Ronald. For Dear Life. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2015.

Wick, Gerry Shishin. The Book of Equanimity. Wisdom Publication. 2005.

Wright, Richard. HAIKU – This Other World. Arcade Publishing. 1998.

Zaleski, Philip, The Best American Spiritual Writing – 2006. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2006

Individual quotes and poems are cited in the body of the text.

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Many thanks to John Tarrant, Zen teacher and roshi, director of the Pacific Zen Institute, whose books include:

The Light Inside the Dark – Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life. Harper Perrenial. 1998.

Bring Me The Rhinoceros – And Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy. Harmony Books. 2004.

Explore the Pacific Zen Institute (PZI) website at: www.pacificzen.org which includes a rich array of resources including upcoming retreats, background on Zen-Chan koan work, curriculums, history, with video of dharma talks and teachers.

Dane Cervine is the author of several books of poetry, including How Therapists Dance, and, The Jeweled Net of Indra, published by Plain View Press. He is a long-time meditator, interested in the interface between poetry, therapy, and spirituality. Dane maintains a therapy practice, and is the former Chief of Children’s Mental Health in Santa Cruz County. Visit his website at: www.DaneCervine.typepad.com

Elegy to the Bone Kimono – Zen Assays

Writer person completely like monk. Poetry is your meditation. —the wise monk Tsung Tsai in George Crane’s Bones of the Master.

The odd title, Elegy to the Bone Kimono is a poetic mix of three poetry book titles alluded

to in the first assay. It is meant as a bit of Zen provocation, illustrative of the blending

of boundaries inherent in moments of practice and poetry. It also alludes to the way

that Zen as Zen (kimono, tradition) is always disappearing, changing form—even the

bones of it.

Essays, or assays—to stretch both poetry and Zen worlds, to find the seams, the zipper-

teeth where they are zippered and sewn together into one robe—the classic image of the

seamless life of non-dual practice. Not two, but one.

These assays are inflected, too, by the literary form of zuihitsu, or Flowing Brush—a

classical Japanese form derived from a Chinese literary tradition that employs random

thoughts, diary entries, reminiscence, and poetry. Dane Cervine reminds us that there

is a long history of such endeavors—giving voice to the wordless. Each poet, each Zen

student, adding a verse to the Great Koan of life.

∞

Dane Cervine is a long time meditator, poet, and therapist – studying now with John

Tarrant’s Pacific Zen Institute. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals,

including the Hudson Review, Atlanta Review, the SUN Magazine, TriQuarterly,

Inquiring Mind, Turning Wheel. His books include How Therapists Dance, and, The

Jeweled Net of Indra from Plain View Press.

Kado Press